AN
AGORIST
PRIMER
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
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2
AN
AGORIST
PRIMER
by
Samuel Edward Konkin III
ggma
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
[PDF copy of KoPubCo] 1st Edition, Dec. 2008
ISBN 10 0-9777649-4-X [of the hardback]
ISBN 13 978-0-9777649-4-5 [of the hardback]
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4
This book is dedicated to
Teny Rule Fisher, Thelma Rule, and
John Fragnito, without whom this book
would not have happened.
Most of all, though, this book
is dedicated to my son,
Samuel Edward Konkin IV,
to whom I offer this blueprint
for liberty as his legacy.
Table of Contents
Preface 8
Publisher's Note 9
Introduction 10
Chapter One: Economics 14
Chapter Two: Applied Economics 24
Chapter Three: Counter-Economics 39
Chapter Four: Applied Counter-Economics ...46
Chapter Five: Libertarianism 53
Chapter Six: Applied Libertarianism 59
Chapter Seven: Agorism 71
Chapter Eight: Applied Agorism 90
Afterword 99
About the Author 102
Other Works of SEK3 103
AN
AGORIST
PRIMER
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Preface
deas evolve and grow. At some point, an idea con-
nects with so many other concepts that it becomes
central to a way of thinking — an ideology.
At some state of an ideology's life, between its
birth and death, it reaches a level of maturity such
that someone is motivated to divert his efforts from
expanding it outward and upward and begins to
look downward. That is, the theoretician pauses to
pass on the knowledge to those not specializing in
theoretical development. Perhaps the theoretician
is reminded for whom he developed the ideology in
the first place.
Agorism is a way of thinking about the world
around you, a method of understanding why things
work the way they do, how they do, and how they
can be dealt with — how you can deal with them.
Agorism was meant to improve the lot of everyone,
not a chosen elite or unwashed underclass. Hence an
introductory work that presents ideas without going
through the long intellectual history and conflict of
competing ideas that produced them. As the creator
of agorism, it is most incumbent on me first to at-
tempt to reduce it to basic intelligibility. I hope my
efforts find some small reward.
— Samuel Edward Konkin III
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Publisher's Note
Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote An Agorist
Primer in 1986. A small number of Xerox
copies were circulated to investors in the
hope that they would finance the publication of
a high-quality, hardcover edition. Though some
money was raised, it proved insufficient to produce
the book. Even though the photocopies bore text
reading "First Edition", it was meant to refer to
the proposed hardback edition. This, then — the
book you hold in your hands — is the true first
edition as SEK3 intended it.
An effort has been made to update the book
in order to keep it relevant, though none of the
timeless — and timely — agorist philosophy has
been altered. Such archaic terms as "videotapes"
and "cassettes" have been replaced by "DVDs" and
"downloads". Information about major wars since
1986 have been added, staying — we hope — in
the spirit of SEK3's other analyses. Notice has
been taken of the collapse of Communism, brought
about in no small part by Counter-Economics.
Any mistakes, failures to catch archaisms, or
errors of analysis added to the original text are
entirely the fault of the current editor and not of
the late author. — V.K.
9
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Introduction
Agorism can be denned simply: it is thought
and action consistent with freedom. The
moment one deals with "thinking," "act-
ing," "consistency," and especially "freedom,"
things get more and more complex.
Hold on to the virtue of consistency. The refusal to
compromise, to deceive oneself, to "sell out" or to "be
realistic" created agorism. Consider "being realistic."
This usually implies that theory is fine for thinking,
but in practice one must deal with reality. Agorists
believe that any theory which does not describe
reality is either useless or a deliberate attempt by
intellectuals to defraud non-specialists.
When someone urges you to be realistic, may
you pick an agorist book to get the best descrip-
tion you can find of how agorism actually works.
If you want to find books and articles that will
"fake reality" for wishes, whims, fears, and spite,
look for labels such as "Liberal," "Conservative,"
"Socialist," "Communist," "Fascist," or — worst of
all — "middle of the road" and "moderate."
Reality knows no moderation; it is — all the way.
One way of thinking came close to agorism
and is fairly well-known today; we will deal with
Libertarianism later in some detail. An ideology
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
of Liberty, it had to choose at one point between
consistency with reality and being the "politics of
liberty." It chose the latter: the contradiction of
seeking political power over others to eliminate
political power over others.
Those who continued to seek liberty consis-
tently and without the practical contradiction of
Libertarians became agorists. This is a second,
historical definition for you.
Agorism is an ideology, then, but it is also a sci-
entific and definitely materialist way of thinking.
It is not a religious view — save that it believes
absolute freedom to be moral — nor does it wish
to displace anyone's religious views — unless they
lead to slavery. Agorism wants no "true believers"
in the sense of blind followers. Like any scientifi-
cally based mode of thought, it will evolve as does
our understanding of reality. One who has faith
in something proven false that was once a tenet
of agorism is not an agorist.
Reality is our standard. Nature is our lawgiver.
In a general sense, agorism is scientific in that
it bases itself on verifiable observations about
reality. But it is scientific in a specific sense as
well. It may be hard for chemists, physicists, and
engineers to believe that a "hard science" was ever
developed in fields such as economics and political
science; but the discovery of this science by me —
a hard-bitten theoretical chemist, cynical of "soft"
science — led eventually through libertarianism
to agorism.
The study of human action (praxeology)* pro-
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
duced some repeatable observations deserving the
title of scientific law. The area of human action
dealing with exchanges between acting humans
(catallactics)* covers the same area of thought that
economics is supposed to cover, but often with very
different conclusions.
This kind of economics (sometimes called Aus-
trian economics)* was used by speculators such
as Harry Browne and Doug Casey for investing
in hard-money instruments, beating taxes, and
surviving when society around them is operating
on unreason and folly. It is that potent, a tool for
survival amidst gloom and doom.
However, it can be more. By applying this economic
understanding to all human action regardless of the
wishes, whims, fears, and spite of the most powerful
agency in society — the State (coercive government)
— a new field of theory dealing only with practical
action emerges: Counter- Economics.
Finally, when libertarian theory meets Counter-
Economics, what comes out — in strict consistency,
both external and internal — is Agorism. This is
still another definition.
And this is the definition with which I feel
most comfortable, the one that the thieves of the
intellect find hardest to pervert or steal: Agorism
is the consistent integration of libertarian theory
*If this area of study appeals to you, by all means
go to the source: Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises.
You'll find all the terms starred herein are derived and
denned in detail.
12
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
with counter-economic practice; an agorist is one
who acts consistently for freedom and in freedom.
A basic understanding of agorism falls natu-
rally into four phases of integration or four steps
of learning. In addition to grasping the premises
involved, one should be able to apply them. Re-
member always that agorism integrates theory
and practice. Theory without practice is game-
playing; taken seriously, it leads to withdrawal
from reality, mysticism, and insanity. Practice
without theory is robotic; taken seriously, it leads
to tilling barren soil and showing up for work at
closed factories. Perhaps it would help to think of
theory as wedded to practice where divorce leads
to ruin. Or the relationship could be viewed as
that between brain and stomach or mind and body:
neither can survive without the other.
So four concepts and four applications lead
naturally to eight chapters.
The author and publisher welcome your ques-
tions because they will indicate where we can
clarify and improve subsequent editions.
13
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter One
Economics
Y7
conomics is a dismal science. Those under-
~H standing certain economic concepts profit
^/flamboyantly. Economics is a tool corpo-
rations and governments use to control society.
Those understanding economic concepts have
toppled governments that refuse to face the very
same concepts. Economics is a meaningless college
exercise. Speculators understanding economics
make millions of dollars and save others from
financial ruin. Here is our problem: all the above
statements are true.
If that makes you think there's an inconsistency
in the use of Economics, you are correct. With a
lower-case "e," economics is the study of relations
between people involving goods and services. With
a capital "E," Economics is an institution financed
mostly by government and its tax-privileged foun-
dations. With foundation money, this institution
controls — however imperfectly — those who
would learn and teach economics at government
schools or private colleges.
Maybe this appears to be a big deal made out
of little; after all, is not most of chemistry and
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
astronomy and mathematics also institutional-
ized? Imagine the case where only "pro- government
chemistry," "conservative astronomy," or "socialist
biology" was taught and those who tried to teach
straight science were vilified as crackpots. Fan-
tastic? Lysenko's pseudo-biology was taught in
the Soviet Union because it was more in line with
Marxist theory than was straight genetics. Cur-
rently, Man-Made Global Warming is approach-
ing the status of state-approved climatology, with
dissenters shouted down, de-funded, smeared as
apologists for polluters, and even threatened with
the recision of their academic degrees.
Perhaps you will grant that government can use
its control of schools and colleges to teach a twisted
version of economics. Could, then, better econom-
ics be taught if government were improved? The
answer is, "not a chance!" As you will see in Chap-
ter Six, if people understood economics, coercive
government could not survive. (And uncoercive
government is a contradiction in terms.)
What we wish to accomplish in this chapter is
simply to give you a basic understanding of real
economics. No, this is not just to help explain the
rest of this book; with even an elementary un-
derstanding of economics, fewer con games can
defraud you — especially the high stakes, politi-
cal kind.
Let us start with why people act economically.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Value
Right down there at the very bottom, we be-
gin. Human beings act. Why? Ludwig Von
Mises said it best: to remove felt unease. If you
were perfectly content, nothing and no one nagging at
you, and you knew that if you did nothing you could
continue to be content, would you move? Remember,
moving from this state would increase unhappiness.
Of course you wouldn't move. Even if you said you
would move to relieve boredom, you would be violating
the hypothesis. You would be more bored by moving
since that is an increase in unhappiness.
Aha! Is that not a contradiction? you rightfully
ask. Correct. And if an assumption leads to a con-
tradiction, it is wrong. Our assumption was that
you could achieve a state of ease; therefore, such
a human condition is impossible.
In reality, man always has reason to feel unease:
to feed himself, clothe himself, shelter himself,
reproduce, and feed, shelter, and clothe others,
amuse himself, and so on. Unease cannot be elimi-
nated. It can, however, be reduced. It can also,
unfortunately, be augmented.
If you seek to starve yourself or bore yourself,
you increase your unease. Some actions you per-
form achieve negative goals; some achieve positive
ones. Those which remove felt unease are values.
If someone else has something that will remove
your unease but taking it will increase theirs, we
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
have a conflict in values. This conflict in values
need not arise from direct confrontation. Suppose
you and another are offered a scrumptious dessert,
and the other is dieting desperately. You value it;
the other disvalues it.
Value is subjective. This simple insight, made by
Carl Menger (teacher of Von Mises), revolution-
ized primitive economics and cured many of the
problems plaguing the science since Adam Smith.
Had Marx heeded Menger, socialism would have
been abandoned.
Subjective value leads to individualism. It also
explains so powerfully why people trade and
it demolishes theories of "exploitation". Before
subjective value, Marx could look at the work of
Adam Smith — who thought value arose from the
amount of labor one put into producing something
— and see no productive role for anyone but labor-
ers, concluding that all the others must be para-
sites. There are parasites in our system, economics
tells us, and we shall use our new understanding
to ferret them out in the next chapter.
Finally, when people trade, they are acting to
remove felt unease in both directions. You may
give up a smaller value for a larger but never the
other way around — voluntarily. If you're willing
to let your brother work for you and pay him "more
than he's worth," you know that this means, to
you, "he's worth extra because he's my brother."
You've still gained a greater value.
If values were not subjective, why would anyone
trade? We would all value things equally and be
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
content with what we had. Well, not entirely; we
could also want more of a value. Onward, then, to
the next powerful economic concept.
Marginal Utility
Suppose you, being a shepherd, had ten sheep,
and a nice woolen coat you laboriously made
from your eleventh sheep. If someone came along
and offered you a coat just like it for your tenth
sheep, you'd tell them to buzz off. Along comes a
rich shepherd and sees your coat. You tell him
how you got it and even tell him how to make one.
He can think of better things to do than to make
a coat, but he'd like to have one. He'll trade you a
sheep for a coat.
No better off subjectively, you refuse. He offers you
two and you know you'd be ahead: you can make an-
other coat and have eleven sheep again. Meanwhile,
the rich shepherd would rather have 98 sheep and
a coat than a hundred sheep and no coat.
But this example so far is still one of subjective
value. His final offer is three sheep. Joyfully, you
accept. As you are leaving, you run into another
poor shepherd with ten sheep and a coat. (There
seems to be a lot of this going on.)
He offers you coat for sheep and is willing to
accept two sheep. You're still ahead — eleven
sheep and the coat! And you don't have to make
it yourself. Such a deal!
Using the wool coat as our medium of exchange,
we find out something interesting. Sheep are sheep
18
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
(as far as this example is concerned) yet while you
traded your eleventh sheep for a coat and would
not have traded your tenth, you did trade both
your twelfth and thirteenth sheep for a coat. This
principle where you value each additional unit
less and less is called marginal utility. (You are
operating at the margin and "utility" is an older
word for value.)
All sheep (and dollars) are not alike; marginal
ones are cheaper. Besides giving us an idea which
can handle more in economics, and also help us
to spot frauds such as tax redistribution (see next
chapter), marginal utility leads directly to the
next concept.
Division of Labor
O ubjective value may lead us to think we would
O'prefer producing some goods rather than oth-
ers, or transporting them, trading them, serving
them, or storing them. Yet it is marginal utility
which tells us why this specialization works. If I
produce ten cooked hamburgers an hour and you
produce twelve, and we happen to eat the same, it
is obvious who has more surplus to trade and will
be eager to do so. I should check out other lines of
productivity or move to a less desirable (at least
to you) location where I can compete.
This process, where we are led to specialize by
greater productivity and greater reward (value-
seeking), is called division of labor. Von Mises
speculated that it was the glue holding society
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
together; and if you think of society as bigger than
a nuclear or extended family, he is right.
If Jane sings beautifully, and we do not, division
of labor is why I'm writing this book, eating your
hamburgers, and we're listening to Jane on the radio.
Basics
ith such basic ideas as those about trade,
exchange, goods and services that you
(hopefully) already brought with you to this dis-
cussion, added on to the concepts of subjective
value, marginal utility, and division of labor, you
are properly armed for understanding agorism.
There is far more to economics and still more being
discovered and written about by the (all too few)
right kind of economists.
Before moving on, there is one economic spe-
cialty that deserves some extra attention. Since
it is so much on everyone's minds, you probably
guessed that it is money.
Money
oney is heavily mystified and it's not hard
to see why. "A fool and his money are soon
parted" is a truism nearly as old as money itself.
If you can be confused as to what money is or how
it works, you can be parted from it by those who
know what money is.
Remember our sheep example? We called the
wool coat a medium of exchange to show the dif-
20
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
ferent values of a sheep. But if we had many
wool coats and one sheep being traded back and
forth, we could use the same example to show the
marginal utility of the eleventh coat (or whatever
number happened to work) and the use of sheep
as a medium of exchange.
Straight trade of goods for goods — barter — is
crude, and problems related to making change are
difficult to solve. Sheep die and wool coats wear
out; they do not store value well. And — since value
is subjective — changes in your needs, tastes, and
circumstances alter your values anyway. Nothing
can store a changing quantity or, as math majors
would say, fix a variable.
What we would like is something that makes
change, stores its value, and is universally accept-
able (everyone wants it all the time). To be blunt,
there is no such thing and never will be, though
all bank directors, congressmen, and commissars
might decree otherwise. Subjective value assures
us of that.
But suppose some substance could be divided
down to its atoms without changing, be more resis-
tant to wear and corrosion than almost anything
else, be easily recognized and easily checked as
to purity, and be valued already by a lot of people
for its usefulness and good looks. Suppose further
that it "did it better" than anything else offered
in competition?
Would not most people flock to it and make it
money? No laws would need be passed or institu-
tions founded or advertising campaigns conducted
21
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
to make it so. Nature would take care of it. Second,
third, and fourth choices might be used, but the
first would be the standard by which the others
were measured.
Such a substance has been known for millennia.
Gold, and its close chemical relatives platinum,
silver, and copper, remains the choice of a free
market. Even in an unfree market, where money
is imposed by force against the will of traders (that
is, by fiat), gold remains the money of the "under-
ground economy" and of the "overseas economy"
working around the fiat money.
Why fiat money exists at all and what it has to
do with inflation is an important topic in our next
chapter.
Value-Free Economics
(Oo far we have avoided loaded terms such as
0>"free market," "competitive economy," "free
trade," "fair trade," and so on. The Austrian
economists (Menger, von Mises, Eugen von Bohm-
Bawerk and their students) believed economics
should be a science free of such terms, a "value-
free" (wertfrei) science.
Science has values; try to engage in research
without a commitment to truth or an affinity for
reality. Many people hold values that are impos-
sible to achieve in reality and are frustrated —
they hurt themselves. Many people seek to gain
values by misrepresenting reality to others; when
they are challenged, they accuse the exposers of
22
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
holding different, competing values. Thus "value-
free scientists" — including economists — find they
cannot remain forever neutral in their ivory towers.
To the extent, though, that they try by keeping
their own subjective values out of the way, they do
accomplish much. The scientific method works. And
being able to tell people that stealing from everyone
and then giving it back to them will make them
less well off is useful, not matter how unpopular.
This is where the application of economics enters.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Two
Applied Economics
Agorism is more than economics, but agorist
thinking is impossible without that basic
understanding. Just applying the basic
economics we have learned so far can sweep
away a lot of misconceptions and eliminate a lot
of confusion about how the world works. We also
can deal with some of the misleading con jobs of
Economics — however, explaining why Econom-
ics is so twisted will have to wait until we apply
libertarianism later.
The Free Market
Agorism upholds the free market. To under-
stand why, one first needs to know what
the free market is and what its alternatives are.
Again, why is left for later. The term "agorism"
is derived from the ancient Greek word agora,
meaning an open market place.
The market is not a single place or center. Goods
and services are exchanged at the corner store, on
the stock exchange, at a swap meet, in your back-
yard, or across the Internet. Playing a game with
24
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
a friend is not a market transaction, but foregoing
the time that each of you could spend on working
or buying or selling is a market transaction.
All social interaction has a market component.
Economics may be far more pervasive than we
thought. It is difficult to imagine how we could
have a free society — should we wish it — without
a free market. Perhaps we should be clear with
reference to what we mean by "free."
Free means the absence of coercion. Coercion
is threatening violence upon someone in order
to make him surrender something. In a strictly
value-free sense, then, coercive human action of-
fers to create a greater disvalue to you if you do
not yield up your lesser value. You gain nothing
but lose less.
Repeated application of coercion destroys val-
ues. The coercer gains without producing anything
of value and the victim always loses. Voluntary
exchange, as we have seen, occurs when both feel
a gain in subjective value. Unease is relieved in
both directions. In coercive transactions, unease
is increased.
Retrieving your goods from the coercer with
the threat of greater force and enough extra for
your time and trouble at least wipes out your loss,
although it leaves the original coercer with a net
loss. At this point, he may finally become aware
of the value destruction of coercion. Or he may
simply decide he needs still greater force. (The
biggest force of all in an area is usually the State,
but we'll come to that later.)
25
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Strictly speaking, the free market is the absence
of all that coercion. If there were only a few "pri-
vate thieves" and they were usually apprehended
and forced to make restitution, something very
close to a free market would exist. People would
have locks, fences, alarms, and insurance policies
and protection-agent policies, but would act oth-
erwise on the assumption that they were free to
give up their property to those of their choice and
accept from others who gave freely to them. They
could not plan on people changing their minds,
but they could make contracts (exchanging a good
here and now for one to be given later) so that if
others changed their minds, some compensation
would result.
Planning and Chaos
It quickly becomes clear that planning is far more
practical in a free market than in a coerced mar-
ket. If coercion becomes regular and predictable,
innovative people find ways around it and soon
enough join forces to evade the coercive regula-
tions, frustrating and/or starving the coercer. (See
the next chapter.)
So new forms of coercion must be brought in
and economic planning is disrupted once again.
Some argue that a free market is Chaos; they
see no one giving orders and so think that there
is no order. In reality, a completely free market
is a highly decentralized order. Each "cog" in the
great machine keeps itself well-oiled and seeks
26
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
to mesh itself with the other cogs in ever-better
fits. An even better example is the human body.
While the brain has some overall direction, it can-
not instruct various cells to go about their ways
delivering blood and building tissue and contract-
ing muscle and transmitting energy. A disease or
parasite may "direct" some cells to a common task
— but this results in disruption of the natural or-
der. Even without a "foreign invader," if the brain
could force some cells to act other than naturally,
the entire body would suffer by this imposed order
and the body could die.
The fallacy in "planned economics" is the error
of assuming that order is imposed. Scientists are
aware that order is something you look for in na-
ture — it's already there.
Economics tells us that attempts to impose order
by coercion are destructive and chaotic, yet "economic
planning" of the imposing kind is common to nearly
all schools of Economics. We begin to see where the
gap between economics and Economics lies.
Competition and Monopoly
It's nice if more than one person offers to trade
the same thing with you. You usually can get a
better deal. When more than one seller offers identi-
cal goods, and when more than one buyer offers to
acquire the same goods, pure competition exists.
If only one buyer or seller is available, the buyer
or seller is said to have a monopoly .
Competition is always good in the sense that it
27
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
maximizes value exchanges. Although it would
take more theory to prove this, most people have
had enough experience to accept the foregoing as
a factual statement.
Surely not all monopoly is bad? If we banned all
monopoly, then Leonardo da Vinci would have had
to give up painting what only he can paint. And the
Beatles would have had to stop composing what
only they can compose. In fact, since a little bit of
"artistry" distinguishes all goods, pure competition
is impossible. There are no identical products.
Yet, for your subjective purposes, you can see
no difference worth paying for among all sorts of
goods. And they do not have to be all that similar.
With fifteen dollars you might decide to buy a book
you wished to spend the evening with. Finding
the book sold, you consider a movie instead. The
lines are too long, so you buy a six pack instead
and go home.
Someone else would have different goods com-
peting for that fifteen dollars, even if he had
started out trying to buy that same book.
If I told you at this point that some Economists
defined a "free market" as a "perfectly competitive"
market, you might wonder when they lost their
senses. After all, if people want to produce different
things (remember division of labor), and are more
productive doing so, you will not get "perfect com-
petition" in the free market. You will have lots of
competition by giving each human actor maximum
freedom to explore his values and find alternatives.
Now if I tell you that these Economists say that
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
if a market is not "perfectly competitive," force
should be used to make it so. You probably are
beginning to wonder if I have not lost my senses.
Whatever these Economists are after, it is not
a free market. Nor will they generate any gains
since values are always net-destroyed by coercion.
Adam Smith defined monopoly as a grant of
exclusive trading by the king. It was a royal privi-
lege; that is, the State coerced some people not to
produce goods when the king's friend was already
doing so. Breaking up these forced monopolies was
an issue for freedom-lovers and rightfully so.
The problems arose when people stopped think-
ing clearly — or had their thoughts muddled by
Economists. Monopoly became bad, not because it
was coercive, but because it was not competitive.
Clear thinking and consistency lead us easily to
realize that the opposite of forced monopoly and
of forced competition is natural monopoly and free
competition. The correct opposition is the coerced
market vs. the free market.
ne problem with monopoly we seemed to have
\JJ overlooked: do not the "big get bigger" and the
"small get driven out" even if the market is left
alone? The answer is obvious empirically: histori-
cally, it has never happened. There is extensive
literature by the better sort of economists on
many historical examples where businesses were
accused of forming "trusts" — that is, attempting
Cartels
29
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
to monopolize one industry through cartels.
Most cases, when State trustbusters were
brought in to "break up" a large company, proved
to have been instigated by smaller companies
against a more efficient competitor.
Cartels, as Dr. Murray Rothbard has beauti-
fully shown, tend to break up from market forces.
The most efficient cartel member can outsell his
fellow members and has a tremendous incentive
to "cheat" on the cartel agreement. He can "steal"
the customers from his fellow members and soon
does, "under the table." Upon discovery, his fellow
cartel members fight back by cutting prices and
the cartel disintegrates.
In a coerced market, however, the cartel will
run to someone to force compliance with the cartel.
That someone is, in any realistic unfree market,
the State. And once again we are back to the forced
or State monopoly.
Profit and Enterprise
Sometimes the terms "free enterprise" and "capi-
talism" are used to mean "free market."
Capitalism means the ideology (ism) of capital or
capitalists. Before Marx came along, the pure free-
marketeer Thomas Hodgskin had already used the
term capitalism as a pejorative; capitalists were trying
to use coercion — the State — to restrict the market.
Capitalism, then, does not describe a free market but
a form of statism (see Chapter Five), like communism.
Free enterprise can only exist in a free market
30
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
and is an acceptable synonym, yet while the term
market covers all human transactions, enterprise
seems limited to certain types of business. And
what about profit! Is it the result of "exploitation,"
enterprise, hard work, or something else?
Applying economic knowledge here resolves the
problem clearly but it will take a little effort to
follow through. According to (Austrian) econom-
ics, there are three productive functions in the
marketplace: Labor, capital, and entrepreneur-
ship. In the simplest, primitive economy, capital
consists of tools, food you have stored to keep you
going until your harvest comes in or you can sell
the shoes you made, and storefronts or wagons to
take your goods to market. Labor is the work you
put into farming or shoemaking or whatever.
Entrepreneurship is direction, the reins of the
operation, deciding where to invest the capital
and which and how many workers to hire. As the
market progresses to greater wealth and complex-
ity, we can see that the important components
of entrepreneurship are risk-taking and innova-
tion. Speculators, inventors, and artists (without
patrons) are the best-known, fairly "pure" entre-
preneurs. They take risks, create (1) a product
that did not exist before, which turns out to have
a demand; (2) a better product to replace one that
existed before, winning away the demand; (3) a
cheaper method of producing or marketing the
same product, again winning away the demand.
The gain resulting from pure entrepreneurship
is profit. It is not the everyday return on investment
31
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
that a businessman counts over his expenses and
takes home.
Windfall profits occur when there is a sudden
change in market conditions, such as weather
wiping out crops or producing bumper harvests,
mineral and oil strikes suddenly coming onto the
market or — when the market is not free — sud-
den government interference in the marketplace.
Those who make the most effort to anticipate the
unexpected tend to make the most profits.
Taking risks also means one can introduce prod-
ucts no one wants, invent devices that are laughed
away, and create artsy trash. Such creations incur
negative profit (loss) and, alas, this is at least as
common, historically, as profit.
Nonetheless, without entrepreneurship — en-
terprise — the economy would stagnate as people
continue investing the same capital in the same
way, over and over, and workers continue at the
same jobs. When skilled laborers begin to die
out and capital runs out of components, such as
minerals at mines or new forests for timber, the
economy would regress and collapse.
Everyone is part laborer, pan capitalist, and
part entrepreneur, but by division of labor we
tend to specialize. There is nothing to prevent us
from all being wealthy (some day, at any rate)
and using our money (as James Garner put it so
well in the film The Wheeler Dealers) as a way of
keeping score in capital investment. And capital,
in the form of ever-more-intelligent computers,
can reduce labor to a vestigial activity (as neces-
32
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
sary as the human appendix). Entrepreneurship,
on the other hand, is increased, not decreased,
by a progressive market. As our society becomes
more complex and more wealthy, more people will
specialize in entrepreneurial activity and more
people must be free to do so.
Entrepreneurship cannot be forced. When bu-
reaucrats "plan," they spend their time finding
ways of covering their posteriors and pass the
losses on to the taxpayers. They fear replacement
and since they reap little or no reward for success,
they become timid about actually taking risks, and
spend their time creating red tape entanglements
designed to stymie innovation.
Regulation
f TT %ere is nothing positive to say about regula-
JL tion. Regulation is coercion. It prevents subjec-
tive values from being satisfied, "protecting" only
those who do not wish to be protected and penal-
izing only the law-abiding. Regulation destroys
initiative and stifles innovation. Regulation stag-
nates markets. Regulation can and does kill people
when the regulators deny victims the right to take
a chance with so-called risky medication.
Regulation is motivated by fear, envy, and colos-
sal ignorance. There is nothing that can protect
innocent people more than a thorough education
and a vigorous pursuit of fraud; yet regulation of
advertising and experimentation destroys infor-
mation transfer and regulation of quality merely
33
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
certifies incompetent "professionals" and protects
them from fraud charges.
If all the regulation passed in any country you
wish to name were completely obeyed, let alone
enforced, we would all be dead.
Consider a particularly pathological case in the
United States of America. If you charge a price for
your product higher than your competitors, this is
taken as evidence under the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act that you have a monopoly and charges may be
brought against you. The same problem arises if
you charge the same; that is considered evidence
of a cartel and you and your competitors can all be
fined. Finally, if you charge less than your com-
petitors, you are violating the "Fair Trade" laws
in most states and can be arrested and fined. It is
impossible to obey all the regulations.
Taxation
r ][ %ere is a serious moral question about taxa-
X. tion that we will leave for later. Let it suffice
now to recognize that taxation takes something
from someone against his or her will and is a vio-
lation of his or her subjective values. Any specific
form of taxation directs resources counter-entre-
preneurially. In short, taxation has no place in a
free market.
34
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Interest
T
^here are three very closely related concepts
in economics, and they have to do with capital,
land, and money. It is often said that capital earns
a rate of return on investment (remember, only
entrepreneurs make profits), land earns rent, and
money earns interest. With an efficient medium of
exchange, an entrepreneur will quickly shift from
capital goods of one type to another if the rate of
return is higher in one sector of the market than
the other. Land is a fixed form of capital, and — if
we are in a free market — we should expect rent to
come to equal the rate of return as in other invest-
ments — assuming no risks (where profit would
be added or subtracted). And so it is with interest.
Originary interest is what money earns if you lend
it out to an entrepreneur risk-free. Should you ac-
cept risk yourself, you may add on a risk component,
a form of profit. At the same level of risk, in a highly
developed market, interest rates should stabilize
and slowly decrease — as wealth increases.
Only if something becomes powerful enough
— coercive enough — to monopolize (by force) all
the media of exchange (or money supply) and then
increase it so that the value of each unit declines,
will another component appear to increase the
interest rate (regardless of risk). Conceivably it
could decrease the money supply so that the value
would be expected to increase and interest to be
35
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
discounted. In an extreme case, this inflationary
component could drive interest rates to zero or
negative — that is, someone pays you to take his
money and give it back to him later. Deflation is
rare, as there is very little incentive for controllers
of the money supply to deflate.
Inflation
"TT Tnderstanding how inflation works and what
U to do about it made the fortunes of the "gold
bugs" and investment analysts mentioned earlier.
While there is considerable fog and confusion
thrown around this subject, inflation is simple
enough to understand if you follow our step-by-
step logic and (always!) watch for inconsistencies.
From Chapter One we know what money is.
Free-market money could be affected by, say, a gold
strike or, if for some reason the gold was all kept in
a "Fort Knox," by James Bond's Goldfinger nuking
it. Even then, there would be a brief dip or jump
in the "price of gold" (the price of money is simply
the inverse of the prices of everything bought with
it), and stability would resume at the new level. In
a worldwide market, the effect — even of nuking
Fort Knox — would be barely noticeable.
Inflation is the increase of the money supply. In-
flation results only when the most powerful force
in society — the State — commands a monopolistic
fiat money system, creates legal tender laws (legal
tender compels the monopoly, contracts are not up-
held in other "tender" or money), and — with army
36
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
and police to back it up — debases a form of money
that was acceptable in the marketplace.
States that have imposed fiat money from
scratch (such as in newly emerging Third World
countries) find their money rapidly rejected in fa-
vor of foreign currency and gold. The usual route
to inflation takes four steps: 1) Replacement of
money by certificates for the money. A weight of
gold or silver is replaced by a certificate claiming
an ounce of gold or pound of silver in some pre-
cious metal warehouse or "bank." 2) Legal defini-
tion of possession of the certificate as equivalent
to possessing the wealth. (The government gets
into the act.) 3) Restriction of all exchanges (save
primitive bartering) to the legal certificates; this is
the creation of legal tender. 4) Issuing certificates
without money to back them up. At this point we
have fiat money and inflation.
Inflation leads to crack-up booms (German in
1923) and depressions (U.S. in 1929). This analy-
sis is a bit more complicated and is best left to the
more cataclysmic scenarios we'll present near the
end of the book.
Oh, and as you probably guessed, one result
of inflation is a general rise in price level. Notice
that some prices rise faster than others, and some
even seem to drop. Only the distortion is common
to all price changes.
37
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
A Little Knowledge
If you have mastered the first two chapters, con-
gratulations! You will quickly discover two
things by simply reading your daily newspaper
or news blog or shooting the breeze with your
acquaintances.
First, you will discover the appalling level of
ignorance with which most of society is afflicted.
Be careful — some people get very irritable when
challenged by someone who knows what he is
talking about. A knowledgeable person might be
tempted to use his knowledge to bilk the ignorant.
Many people with only a little knowledge do just
that. However, there are moral ways to profit by
your understanding and, by all means, go to it.
Second, you will discover that the appalling
web of Statism is controlling — or attempting to
control — nearly every aspect of human action.
You will probably feel smothered and that is not
surprising. You may also feel like giving up and
giving in — but survival alone dictates otherwise.
Survival — let alone prosperity — demands
that you tear through the web of legislation and
follow nature's laws instead. You must abandon
Economics to the regulators and the political
"businessmen" who play ball with them. You are
left with the alternative: stifle yourself and starve
or embrace Counter-Economics.
38
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Three
Counter-Economics
e see that nearly every action is regu-
lated, taxed, prohibited, or subsidized.
Much of this Statism — for it is only
the State that wields such power — is so contradic-
tory that little ever gets done. If you cannot obey the
(State's) laws and charge less than, more than, or
the same as your competitor, what do you do? You go
out of business or you break the law. Suppose paying
your taxes would drive you out of business? You go
out of business — or you break the law.
Government laws have no intrinsic relationship with
right and wrong or good and evil. Historically, most
people knew that the royal edicts were for the king's
good, not theirs. People went along with the king be-
cause the alternative looked worse. This line of thinking
leads to Chapter Five, so we'll just note here that even
today, society recognizes the conscientious objector.
the religious dissenter to laws that his deity forbids
him to obey, the man or woman who follows the Law
of God or Nature against the monopoly of force in
society. Since they would rather die than submit, a
society which restrains its government from heavy
repression will exempt many objectors.
39
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
But everyone is a resister to the extent that he
survives in a society where laws control everything
and give contradictory orders. All (non-coercive)
human action committed in defiance of the State
constitutes the Counter-Economy. (For ease of later
analysis, we exclude murder and theft, which
are done with the disapproval of the State. Since
taxation and war encompass nearly all cases of
theft and murder, the few independent acts really
should be classified as other forms of statism.)
Since anything the State does not licence or ap-
prove of is forbidden or prohibited, there are no
third possibilities.
A Counter-Economist is (1) anyone practicing
a counter-economic act; (2) one who studies such
acts. Counter-Economics is the (1) practice (2)
study of counter-economic acts.
The Size of the Counter-Economy
T
^he Counter-Economy is vast. Our brief study
of economics tells us that this should be no
surprise. The more controls and taxation a State
imposes on its people, the more they will evade
and defy them. Since the United States is one of
the less (officially) controlled countries, and the
Counter- Economy here is fairly large, the global
Counter-Economy should be expected to be even
larger — and it is.
U.S. government estimates of the size of just
the tax-dodging part of the Counter-Economy
is twenty to forty million of the population. The
40
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Western European Counter-Economy is larger; in
Italy, much of the civil service sits in government
offices during the early part of the day and then
moonlights at private jobs and business in the
afternoon and evening.
Communism collapsed in no small part due to
the Counter-Economy. Nearly everything was
available in the Counter-Economy with only
shoddy goods and shortages in the official social-
ist economy. The Soviets called Counter-Economic
goods "left-hand" or nalevo and entire manufac-
turing assembly lines co-existed nalevo with the
desultory State industry ones, on the same factory
floor. Counter- Economic "capitalists" sold shares
in their companies and vacationed in Black Sea
resorts. Managers of collective farms who needed
a tractor replaced in a hurry look to the Counter-
Economy rather than see their kolkhoz collapse
awaiting a State tractor delivery. Currently, the
Russian government seeks to reestablish State
control of the economy by granting monopolies
to cronies and imprisoning recalcitrant corporate
executives. As with Communism, this flirtation with
Fascism is just as doomed to failure.
Nothing works in "right-hand" communism;
everything works in the left-hand free market.
From "black" market apartments in the Neth-
erlands to "black" housing in Argentina, the
Counter- Economy is well known to the people
of the world as the place to get things otherwise
unobtainable — or keep things one has earned.
Inflation breeds flight from fiat money; exchange
41
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
controls have created dual exchange rates in
nearly every country on the globe. Whatever the
number of local currency units a tourist can get
for his dollars at the official exchange rate, he or
she can get more on the black market.
Smuggling is so commonplace that nearly all
tourists slip purchases past customs agents with-
out thinking. Perhaps 20%-30% of Americans fail
to report taxable income (actually nearly 100% fail
to report at least some); but, in Latin American
countries, close to 80% goes uncollected and the
State supports itself by ever-greater inflation of
the fiat money supply.
The border between Hong Kong and Communist
China and even the ocean straits between Taiwan
and the mainland bustle with illegal trade. West-
ern DVDs and jeans were once illegally available
in most provinces of China — now they're manu-
facturing them there!
Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, remains
the black market center of Vietnam. Even more
telling, it produces most of the goods and services
of all Vietnam. Myanmar's (Burma's) rigidly con-
trolled official economy, according to the Manches-
ter Guardian, is nothing but paper and the entire
market has gone black.
Under the noses of American forces, Afghani tribes
grow, process, and ship heroin by the metric tonne.
Tax evasion, inflation avoidance, smuggling,
free production, and illegal distribution still com-
pose only half the Counter- Economy. Labor flows
as freely as capital, as hordes of "illegal aliens"
42
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
pour across borders from more-statist to less-
statist economic regions.
Consciousness-altering substances and even
unproven medicines such as dichloroacetate and
Laetrile make up a well-known but small frac-
tion of the Counter- Economy. Drugs are grown
on huge plantations, refined in scores of factories
and laboratories, distributed by fleets of boats,
planes, trucks and cars, and sold to customers by
regiments of wholesalers and armies of street dealers.
The State's imposition of some people's moral
codes on others leads to Bible smuggling in atheist
States and pornography publishing in conserva-
tive religious States. The "world's oldest profes-
sion," as sexual prostitution has been titled, is
also — if that title is true — the world's oldest
counter-economic industry.
Feminists seeking control of their own bodies
look to the Counter-Economy to obtain contracep-
tives and find midwives to deliver babies their way
in the Counter- Economy.
Nobody works at anything anywhere which is
not connected with Counter-Economics. Those
looking for a more exhaustive listing of counter-
economic activities, with all the sources and refer-
ences footnoted, are invited to read the author's
upcoming book Counter -Economics .
Information
r If ^ wo Counter- Economic industries are singled
out for their importance to agorism. Justice
43
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
is a commodity; its manner of distribution defines
a social system and will be covered in detail in
Chapter Seven.
The other business is Information. The Internet
explosion has led the American State — for now,
at any rate — to throw up its tentacles at regula-
tion of the Information industry. Every legisla-
tive session, however, brings new attempts to tax
and control the World Wide Web. But consider
this well: should the Counter-Economy lick the
information problem, it would virtually eliminate
the risk it incurs under the State's threat. That
is, if you can advertise your products, reach your
consumers and accept payment (a form of infor-
mation), all outside the detection capabilities of
the State, what enforcement of control would be left?
At the leading edge of Web development today
is encryption. Advanced researchers have devel-
oped methods of "locking away" data in memory
banks that defy any "breaking in." That is, the
State cannot reach the invoices, inventory lists,
accounts and so on of the Counter-Economist. An
area of human society immune to the power of the
State deserves the name — if anything does — of
Anarchy. The State, though, continues to attempt
to penetrate privacy with quantum computing
methods of cracking even the most complex cryp-
tographic schemes. Will the Counter-Economy
respond with quantum cryptography? Stay tuned
— the race is hardly at an end.
This leads us to two crucial questions: what
happens if the State is abolished and we have a
44
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
free market and why has the Counter- Economy
not overwhelmed the existing economy already?
These questions bring us back to the land of theory
where libertarianism answers the first question
and agorism the second.
Before we deal with them, let us consider some
applications of counter-economic business prac-
tices and social interactions, which will both il-
lustrate our descriptions and possibly be of some
profit to you and yours.
45
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Four
Applied
Counter-Economics
ounter- Economics is application.
People have discovered and acted in
^w/a Counter-Economic way without un-
derstanding what they are doing, why they are
doing it, and even denying that they are doing
it at all.
Understanding what you are doing usually
helps, and applying Counter-Economics system-
atically and consistently maximizes both your
profit and freedom. As it turns out, the basic
formula is no more difficult than simple account-
ing arithmetic used in all business.
The basic law of Counter-Economics is to trade
risk for profit. Having done so, one naturally
(acting to remove felt unease) attempts to reduce
the risks. If you reduce your risks while others
continue to face the higher risks, you naturally
out-compete and survive longer. And you profit.
46
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
What's The Risk?
It is possible to make a reasonable estimate of
the risks you are taking in Counter- Economic
activity, which is better precision than many busi-
ness ventures offer. The government itself gathers
statistics concerning apprehension of "criminals."
And publishes them. The police agencies brag about
how few cases are solved and how fast the "crime
rate" is growing to justify ever-bigger budgets.
Nonetheless, most "crimes" go completely unre-
ported and undetected, so the State's stats are an
upper limit of apprehension. That is, their figures
are useful as maximum risk. The highest appre-
hension rate for the most foul crimes seldom hit
20%, an indication of government effectiveness in
maintaining public order.
uppose you wish to do something Counter-Eco-
O'nomic. To be specific, you can buy something
for $10,000 and sell it for $20,000. Your regular
overhead is $5000. Your net return on investment
is $5000 (on an investment of $15,000 that's 33%,
extremely high) but, since there is a risk, how can
you tell if the return is worth it?
Let's say the government claims it catches 20%
of those doing what you want to do. If you are
caught, the penalty would be a (maximum) fine
of $50,000 or six months in jail. Your "downside"
risk, then, is 20% of $50,000 or $10,000. In this
Is It Worth It?
47
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
example, it would not be worth it: to gain $5000
but risk losing $10,000.
If the apprehension rate were 10% and the fine
$25,000, then your risk would be $2500 for a gain
of $5000. As is obvious, you could get caught one
time in ten, pay off your fines, and still come out
way ahead. Of course, all these calculations make
certain assumptions about your subjective values.
You may fear risk to a pathological state and any
risk is too much. Or you may love frustrating the
State and take high risks for lower gain just for
the fun of it.
Actually, a more realistic risk estimate would in-
clude the price of a lawyer to beat your charges and
the probability of being convicted after apprehension.
Assume that the retainer to your lawyer raises
your overhead $1000 per transaction. Now your
payoff is $4000, but the conviction rate (with plea
bargaining and court delays) is only 20%. (Again,
that is high in many jurisdictions; many cases are
dropped long before they come to trial.)
Now your risk, using our first figures, is 20% of
20% of $50,000, or $2000. With a payoff of $4000,
a loss of $2000 would deter few entrepreneurs.
If you would like a simple formula for your own
business, try this:
Counter-Economic Payoff = profit minus loss =
(Promised price) minus (cost minus overhead) minus
((Penalty or Fine) x (probability of arrest) x (probability of conviction))
If positive, go. If negative, don't go.
48
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Lowering Risks
T
taking reasonable steps to conceal your activi-
ties from accidental discovery, learning to talk
only to trusted friends, spotting poor risks or gov-
ernment agents all reduce your risk and increase
your payoff. As you develop techniques to lower
your risk, you will increase your counter-economic
activities. More of them become profitable.
These side effects include the creation of an agorist
society. More on that in Chapter Seven.
Counter-Economizing
hile it's true that you cannot obey all the
inconsistent laws of the State and so be
completely "white market," you can live completely
Counter- Economically and be completely "black
market."
In the middle 1970s, the federal State passed
a regulation imposing a maximum speed limit
on U.S. highways of 55 mph. With the threat of
cutting federal funds to states and counties, the
entire driving population decelerated to a creeping
crawl. Or did it?
Consider the following calculation: at 55 mph a
trucker can drive 55 miles in an hour, 550 miles in
ten hours and 2200 miles in 40 hours. At an aver-
age of 70 mph, he makes 700 miles in ten hours
and 2800 miles in 40 hours.
To make it even clearer, assume that the trucker
nets $1000, after costs, for each 600 mile run.
49
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
He makes four runs legally for $4000 in an easy
week, or $5000 by extending his hours or work-
ing weekends. At 70 mph he makes $5000 for the
(roughly) 40 hour week.
With that type of incentive, the race went to
the swift and the "double nickel" speed limit was
scofflawed. But being caught and fined could wipe
out that advantage. Suppose fuel were consumed
at a rate that cost an extra $200 at the higher
speed, and you received an average fine of $200.
Four busts a week and it's no longer worth it.
Along came Citizen's Band Radio. Put $200 or
$400 once into a CB radio investment, reduce your
busts to once a week, and you're back in business.
And that, of course, is what happened. Truckers
"spotted" for each other, formed convoys, and
thwarted the State's "Smokey Bear" highwaymen.
Consider the side effects:
• Truckers found "solidarity" economically, cul-
turally, and anti-politically
• A CB culture exploded into the popular culture
with C. W. McCall's classic song "Convoy"
• Non-truckers who were willing to buy a CB
and learn the culture (especially the language)
were accepted freely into the ordered highway an-
archy. More evasion of regulations followed and the
Counter- Economy grew
• Truckers, many of conservative upbringing,
became considerably more tolerant and willing to
help other "lawbreakers" when their common enemy,
Smokey, threatened.
50
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
The CB explosion is not meant here to be a
model, in the sense of waiting around for the State
to trigger off mass rebellion by an egregiously
stupid law. This happened to be a particularly
spectacular case, but no more than the sudden
jump in counter-economics when Prohibition was
passed in the 1920s or when the draft led to two-
year slavery, and possible death, in 1964. And the
State does not learn from its mistakes, as recent
efforts to reimpose the 55 mph limit as well as
reactivate the draft arise again.
Counter-Economizing Yourself
hatever service you provide the market, you
know best how to counter-economize. You
know best which regulations to avoid first for
maximum payoff-to-risk ratio. You know which
suppliers can be trusted and which cannot. You
know which customers to trust and which not to
trust. Division of labor, subjective value, and hu-
man individuality all contribute to making your
case (and everyone else's) unique.
If you seek or want advice on how best to coun-
ter-economize, you need personal counseling (simi-
lar to investment counseling). But, considering
the hundreds of millions of people — many with
educational and cultural handicaps — who coun-
ter-economize quite successfully, the challenge is
not that great. You need mostly the will to do it.
(And that "Psychological Counter-Economics" will
be important as part of Chapter Eight.)
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
It's undoubtedly easier to extend your counter-
economizing when everyone else is doing it. Most
people are, but in small and different ways.
Still, if you could win more suppliers and cus-
tomers over to your trust and get them to counter-
economize, they would not only resist turning you
in but they would develop a tendency not to leak
secrets and would, therefore, decrease your risk
and increase your payoff both ways.
This fact is the driving force toward expansion of
the Counter- Economy. This force is what Agorism
unleashes against the State.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Five
LlBERTARIANISM
T
"^he basic premise of agorist thinking is that
Counter-Economics has failed to free soci-
ety because Counter-Economics lacks a
moral structure that only a full-blown philosophi-
cal system can provide. In this chapter, we deal
with the other half of this problem: an ideology
unconnected to reality. Where Counter-Economics
is application without theory, Libertarianism is
theory without application.
Many Gods, One Morality
Libertarianism differs from all other philoso-
phies by its pluralism. It does not to ask how
you came to the fundamental moral premise: re-
ligious revelation, atheistic observation, natural
law theory, or many others. Christians, Taoists,
Objectivists, and Pagans travel different routes
to arrive at one moral code in common: initiation
of coercion, or the threat of violence, is immoral.
This is the libertarian principle.
Two things follow from the phrasing: (1) there
are no exceptions, hence libertarianism affects all
53
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
human action by this formulation; (2) it is phrased
negatively , so that anything else is permissible
human behavior, though each adherent may find
other acts immoral or objectionable.
Christianity yields a yes-no answer to every
aspect of human activity; so, too, Marxism, Islam,
Objectivism, and many, many other understand-
ings of the world's nature. In these systems, any-
thing not prohibited is mandatory. You must or
you must not. Libertarianism answers only that
you may or you may not, leaving choice to you.
Any religion or ideology that swears not to co-
erce others to act in accordance with its precepts
is compatible with libertarianism. All religions
and ideologies that use force for anything save
self-defence (in the narrow, immediate sense,
excluding "preventive aggression" and other such
rationalizations) are enemies of libertarianism.
Libertarian Society
Libertarianism's very pluralism prevents one
from ascribing any unanimous characteristic
to Libertarians. They all want Liberty, but for dif-
ferent reasons, and see different ways of achieving
it. Some would take control of the State and "force
people to be free," others would not even resort to
violence to defend themselves. Giving all those
groups their due for enriching Libertarian thought
and life with greater variety than any other ide-
ology, the rigorous application of consistency (to
54
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
which agorists and this book adhere) does settle
some issues.
A free society is one in which Man is constrained
only by unthinking Nature. His fellow men leave
him alone. One can personally live up to this and
one can admit only those who uphold it, expelling
all those who don't. But one cannot prevent anyone
from instituting aggression, one can only deal with
it after the fact.
Statists advocate creating a bigger criminal, a
great monster institution which will terrify nearly
everyone, innocent or guilty, into submission. This
organization will extract some form of acceptance
from its "citizens" and yet plunder them at will
(taxation). It will control their behavior and even
their thinking, though some statists seek to place
some restraints upon this super-criminal organi-
zation. Some of those who advocate the strongest
restraints (as they perceive them) call themselves
"limited government libertarians." Since they seek
a small state or "mini" -archy, they are minarchists.
Consistent libertarians see no place for crimi-
nals, even to fight other criminals. They believe
free-market (all-voluntary) methods will take care
of the few criminals; finding them (investigation),
arresting them (delegated protection), trying them
(arbitration), and restoring lost value to the victim
from the aggressors (restitution). The means of
accomplishing this vary from communal power to
highly technological, competitive business agen-
cies and others in between, such as neighborhood
block associations. Such "no- government libertar-
55
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
ians" are called anarchists. The peaceful libertar-
ians who refuse even to defend themselves have
to be classified with anarchists.
It is bitterly ironic that heavy State propaganda
has convinced many people that anarchists throw
bombs, since most anti-war movements, draft re-
sistance, disarmament, and tax resistance groups
were organized by anarchists of one sort or an-
other. Perhaps 0.01 % of those calling themselves
anarchists throughout history have used a bomb;
100% of all States bomb, shell, and machine-gun
regularly as a matter of course.
A Libertarian society is one which approximates
a free society save for a small percentage of crimi-
nal aggression, which is handled by voluntary
mechanisms. A society in which aggression gets
"out of hand" is one with a ole facto, if not ole jure,
State or government: a statist society.
Libertarianism and the Free Market
A few libertarians advocate communal or
neighborhood social organization with col-
lectively held "property" voluntarily surrendered.
Most libertarians have adopted the free market
and the economic understanding of it developed
in Chapter One. So whenever a conflict between the
Economics of government intervention or confiscation
(statism, for short) and free enterprise emerges in
public debate, Libertarians rush to the forefront
of defence of the individual or non-state group.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Libertarianism often confuses statists of the Left
wing and the Right by opposing both. Libertarians
see war as total "socialism" and march with many
Leftists against it. Yet opposition to welfare stat-
ism allies Libertarianism with some Rightists.
But Statists of the Left and Right are easily distin-
guishable from libertarians in any coalition: threaten
the State's existence and observe their reaction.
Conservatives will give up free enterprise rather
than see government abolished; liberals will go
to war rather than see government abolished.
Libertarians will abolish the State and end both
socialism and war.
Libertarianism and the
Counter-Economy
Libertarian dissidents, from Polish professors
to American students, make up an intellec-
tual field of Counter-Economics. A Yugoslavian
theorist, raised in the Marxist tradition, called for
removing politics from Socialism and embracing
a market economy.
It would appear that there is a natural affin-
ity between the philosophers of freedom and the
practitioners of Counter-Economics. Indeed, few
libertarians would deny the moral correctness of
the latter. An early slogan some radical libertar-
ians put on a button was "Defend The Black Mar-
ket." Libertarianism in the United States traces
its history from the Abolitionist movement to free
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
the slaves, an act of human counter-economics.
And yet, while many abolitionists created and
maintained an Underground Railway to assist
slaves who freed themselves counter-economically,
others called for upholding the law, working
within the system and engaging in politics to take
over the government and pass laws to free slaves.
The same division between activists and reform-
ers afflicts modern libertarians — and many other
ideological movements, to be sure.
George Orwell, who came to a type of libertarian-
ism from activism in the Socialist movement of the
1930s, castigated some of his fellow socialists for
refusing to dirty their hands in actually fighting
for their beliefs on the battlefields of Spain. This
perceptive author of 1 984 and Animal Farm noted
these hypocritical dilettantes' proclivity for hang-
ing around English drawing rooms and waxing
eloquent for the socialist cause while contributing
precious little else. He called them "Parlor Pinks."
Libertarianism is afflicted with more than its
share of "Library Libs" today. Some, though, are
horribly paralyzed by the question, "How do we
achieve a free society?"
This combination of strategic paralysis, moral
lassitude, honest confusion due to the rich variety
of libertarian pluralism, and not a little "selling
out", has weakened libertarianism to the point
where what is presently called the "Libertarian
Movement" may no longer be trusted to defend the
Counter-Economy and achieve a libertarian society.
The next chapter shows why.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Six
Applied Libertarianism
T
A Brief History of Liberty
Y "If ^he history of the Libertarian movement can
be divided into four historical periods. The
first covered most of our history, when
many men and women derived the ideas of free-
dom and defended freedom as they understood
it with little comprehension of the mechanics of
human action. Some of these, such as the Quak-
ers of Pennsylvania, settled colonies away from
predatory statism and developed peace and trade
with the natives.
The American Revolution erupted the year that
Adam Smith published the first basic work on
economics. Still, the confused American Revolu-
tionaries allowed the Federalist statists to restore
a strong central government by a bit of trickery
called the "Constitution," a piece of paper which
supposedly guaranteed to restrain the new State.
Most of the Revolutionaries — nearly all the
signers of the Declaration of Independence, for
instance — opposed the Constitution. Many Amer-
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
icans were taken in by the statist selling job and
laid down their arms that were defending them,
practically in exchange for the paper guarantee.
As soon as the new government was elected,
it sent the military to Pennsylvania to crush the
tax-rebels who opposed the new tax on whiskey
distillation.
In England, soon after, a man named William
Godwin took the political ideas of the American
Revolutionaries to their logical conclusion and
became the first anarchist. In the 1830s European
intellectual scene, a man named Max Stirner com-
bined anarchy with defence of the free market (as
far as Adam Smith understood it then) and created
a philosophy of egoism or total individualism. For
a time, he contested with Marx and Engels for
the loyalty of the Young Hegelians in the German
clubs. They wrote a two-volume defense of their
theory against Stirner (The German Ideology).
In the United States, Josiah Warren continued
the anarchist tradition in Massachusetts. One
of his abolitionist followers, Lysander Spooner,
finally developed the killing argument against the
U.S. State in his remarkable natural law treatise,
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.
Alas, it was nearly a century late because the
State was entrenched well enough to fight a civil
war to destroy the remaining internal restraints
on its power — naturally, under the pretext of
expanding freedom by abolishing slavery.
Spooner saw through that smokescreen and
supported both abolition and secession of the
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Southern States. His follower, Benjamin Tucker,
discovered Stirner's European individualism
and combined the two traditions. The heyday of
Individualist Anarchism, during the publication
of Tucker's Liberty magazine, from 1881 to 1908,
could be called the second stage of Libertarianism.
George Bernard Shaw, for example, broke into the
American literary scene through Liberty. (The full
title of Tucker's journal was Liberty: the Mother,
Not the Daughter, of Order)
Tucker still had problems with economics, not
understanding subjective value or the validity of
rent, interest, and profit. While willing to accept
anything arrived at freely, he and his associates
spent their energies on side issues and invalid
controversies. When World War I broke out, they
lost the center stage of history to the socialists for
half a century.
At the same time that Tucker himself was giv-
ing up, brilliant Austrian economist Ludwig Von
Mises wrote his doctoral thesis (1910), The Theory
of Money and Credit, which explained interest,
inflation, and business cycles. His analysis led to
an easy explanation (and prediction) of the Great
Depression, but it went unheeded. In 1949, Mises
published his magnum opus, Human Action. Along
the way, he sent the Communist Economists into
a panic by proving that economic calculation was
impossible once socialist statists destroyed the
free-market pricing system.
During the 1920s and 1930s, proto-libertarians
such as H.L. Mencken and Albert J. Nock kept
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
the philosophy alive but in despair. One of Nock's
students, Frank Chodorov, reached one of Mises's
students, Murray Rothbard. In 1950, Rothbard
connected with the American anarchist tradition
and the modern libertarian stage began.
Another of Nock's students, Suzanne LaFollette,
inspired many modern libertarian feminists. More
women — Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Patterson
— kept libertarianism alive in the 1940s.
For twenty years, Rothbard tirelessly sold his
consistent libertarian view in intellectual circles
and was purged from the Right, from Objectivists,
from the Left, and various other groups, always
taking a few more with him, never despairing. In
1969, during the heat of the student revolt against
the Vietnam War and the draft, both the leftist
Students for a Democratic Society and the rightist
Young Americans for Freedom split internally. The
anarchists from SDS joined the free marketeers
from YAF at a convention called by Dr. Rothbard,
and thousands of young activists were unleashed
onto the campuses to fight for pure freedom.
Within a few years, there were a million Liber-
tarians in North America and small groups from
England to Spain to Australia. Libertarians gradu-
ated and started businesses or entered the higher
levels of academy, bringing reinforcements to Dr.
Rothbard and his previously small corps. Liber-
tarian reporters, authors, and even newscasters
spread through the media.
Robert LeFevre, another libertarian educator
contemporary with Rothbard, graduated hundreds
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
of businessmen from his seminars and thousands
from Rampart College. Leonard Read and his crew
reached many from all walks of life at the Foun-
dation for Economic Education. New foundations
and institutes sprang up.
Early in 1971, a group of Calif ornians started a
"Libertarian Party" as a front for distribution of
literature and appeal for equal time on local me-
dia. In December of 1971, David F. Nolan convened
a founding convention of a Libertarian Party in
deadly earnest. Rothbard scoffed at the idea of a
party as wildly premature.
In 1972, an LP presidential candidate got few
votes, but, thanks to a renegade Republican elec-
tor from Virginia, John Hospers, Professor of Phi-
losophy at the University of Southern California,
received one electoral vote. His running mate,
Toni Nathan of Oregon, became the first woman to
receive one. The elector, Roger MacBride, became
the LP nominee for president in 1976.
The LP emerged from two sources: impatience
and inconsistency. In 1972, the student movement
collapsed but the graduates needed years to affect
society by working their way through the system
and building alternatives outside it. This desire
to achieve results now — get rich quick — was
expressed in the return of many who had rejected
the Statist system to re-enter it, though most of
those entering the LP were not the politically
cynical old-timers.
The more raw recruits to libertarianism had lit-
tle direct experience with politics and so accepted
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
arguments that the party would spread the word
to people used to receiving it via the biennial elec-
toral process. While half the LP recruiters swore
that the LP was an educational tool and would
never win an election and take power, the other
half promised the replacement of the Republicans
by the new party and the transformation of society
from the top down.
During 1973, the party threat became serious
and the libertarian movement began to split. The
anti-party libertarians called themselves vari-
ous names such as New Libertarians, Left (more
consistently radical) Libertarians, Radical Liber-
tarians, and exotic names such as Voluntaryists.
The common goal of these activists was to deflect
the Party anti-principle in the minds and hearts
of most libertarians and pursue the original goals
of Liberty in libertarian — that is, anti-political
— ways. The Partyarchs (as those who professed
being ruled by a party, yet called themselves an-
archists, were then called) and their minarchist
allies were small in number but did have an
advantage in getting newspaper and television
coverage. (Radical libertarian campaigns such as
the 1976 "Vote For Nobody" CounterCampaign
received publicity on several hundred radio sta-
tions and 50% of registered American voters failed
to cast ballots.)
More and more "pure" libertarians gave up on
the label as the word was increasingly identified
with a group out to take political power — as
opposed to abolishing it. The New Libertarians
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
found that many who would agree to live freely
and trade without aggression were repelled by the
Libertarian name.
Finally, in 1983, the Movement of the Libertar-
ian Left, the New Libertarian Alliance, and others
moved to drop the Libertarian label entirely. Some
chose the name Voluntaryism. Those wishing to
promote the completely consistent ideology de-
scribed in this book chose the name agorist.
During the 1973 struggle, the challenges for an
alternative strategy to politics were answered by
the NLA founder who discovered and coined the
term Counter-Economics (see Chapter Three).
In 1980, the NLA published New Libertarian
Manifesto, which explained agorism and beyond
to libertarian activists.
The Libertarian Failure
Libertarians were and still are a pluralistic
group. Different interpretations of Liberty
and how to achieve it were cheerfully tolerated for
the most part. The appearance of a "Party line"
was anathema to this spirit of living variety. The
burning issue shifted from "which new libertar-
ian theory works and which does not?" to "which
'Libertarian' candidate can get elected?"
To many, Libertarianism was a fine theory
which had no obvious practice. There are many
paths to freedom (true) and each individual should
choose the one he or she thought most workable.
One that was chosen swallowed up the others.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
(How it did was simple: it tied into the State's
grant of monopoly to ideologies that form a cen-
tralized "political party" and then spokespersons
of that ideology are automatically represented
as servitors or functionaries of that party, even
when they vigorously deny any connection, by the
statist media.)
And, then again, maybe not. "Libertarian" may
have come to mean "LP member" but agorists,
Voluntaryists, Left Libertarians, and such still
outnumber the few thousand LP members and
even the never-since-matched million votes their
candidate, Edward Clark, received in the 1980
U.S. presidential race.
Whether or not libertarianism failed and died —
perverted — so near to 1984 (Orwell's deadline for
tyranny's triumph. . . in the form of an all-powerful
party) or was simply a stage in the evolution of
agorism, building a theory to explain and morally
defend Counter- Economics, is a moot point. Both
positions are, in a sense, true. Agorism is here and
viable for those who wish to live as freely as pos-
sible now and increase their freedom in the future.
What now calls itself "Libertarian" cannot honestly
offer that anymore. Those who understand this will
reject the "Libertarian" Party and other political
solutions to the statist problem; those who accept
the LP will waste their time, energy and wealth in
building a new means of keeping people in bondage
under the thumb of the State.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
The Libertarian Insight and Fallacy
Libertarian theory provided the crucial insight
as to why Counter-Economics was morally
correct as well as (obviously) practical and very
profitable. The crucial issue was that of the State,
its nature, and its evolution.
The easiest paradigm (short model) for the origin
of the State was offered by Franz Oppen-heimer,
a German sociologist, and adapted into American
libertarianism in Albert J. Nock's 1935 book, Our
Enemy, The State. All historical examples fit this
simple paradigm:
When most of humanity settled into peace-
ful farming communities, with perhaps larger
marketplaces (remember the original agora of
Greece) in towns, some people discovered a means
of surviving parasitically from the productivity of
others. They formed robber bands and attacked
towns and settlements, plundering, raping, and
murdering. Probably the original barbarian hordes
were hunters who took to hunting man when their
game died out rather than taking to farming, trad-
ing, or productive manufacture.
These roving groups were a small minority (or
their victims would have died out and they as
well) but large as compared to a single town or
village. Somewhere along the way, one of them
discovered that they could allow the peasants to
live with enough to survive on and come back at
the next harvest for another raid.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Then these raiders had another idea: they would
stay in the same towns, steal lightly but regularly,
murder enough to keep the peasants and mer-
chants in line, and live well. Other areas, seeing
these petty kingdoms arise, decided to submit
themselves to their own home-grown warlords
so that they would not fall prey to foreign war-
riors. (The Book of Samuel in the Old Testament
describes the anarchist prophet Samuel trying to
convince the Israelites that they didn't really want
a king but finally giving in to them.)
Parasites must remain a minority or kill their
hosts. So they discovered religion (and later ideol-
ogy) as a means to intimidate peasants and win
the all-important sanction of the victim (an apt
phrase of Ayn Rand's). Brutal thugs became "kings
by divine right" and some very powerful statists
called Emperors, Pharaohs, or Tsars were said to
be divine, the unstoppable choice of gods.
And so these barbarian raiders institutional-
ized plunder (taxation), murder (execution and
warfare), and even rape (droit de seigneur, for
example). They took control of roads to plunder
the caravans (tolls, tariffs), they suppressed all
rival criminal gangs with their own (police), and
established their own churches, schools, judges,
and even philosophers, minstrels, and artists to
work in their royal courts.
Thus was born the State.
As people come to understand this situation,
and especially important questions of conscience
split religions and ideologies, dissidence grew.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
The State learned to survive by adapting. It used
its Court thinkers (intellectuals) to come up with
new ways of mystifying the people.
The kings "limited" themselves and shared
their plunder with aristocrats and certain favored
merchants. Thus was born mercantilism (which
Adam Smith challenged). Then even peasants and
workers were permitted to plunder their fellow
merchants, farmers, and workers. This was called
Democracy. Groups were allowed to organize to
fight over who should steal from whom (though
an elite of bureaucrats and very rich businessmen
continue, no matter who is elected) and thus were
formed political parties.
The libertarian analysis superbly explained the
political history of the world and — combined with
free-market economics — analyzed depressions,
modern warfare, and revolutions, describing their
causes and predicting the futility of political solutions.
When Libertarianism began to organize itself,
though, much of the movement was bought off
with yet another political party.
To understand the Libertarian fallacy, consider
its insight in other terms. Oppenheimer and Nock
pointed out that there were only two ways to ac-
quire wealth (food, shelter, tools, entertainment).
One could produce some and trade for others — or
one could steal those produced. Those are all the
choices there are. They named the productive way,
the economic means, and the parasitic way, the
political means.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Murray Rothbard, following Ludwig Von Mises's
Human Action with his own economic treatise Man,
Economy and State, added that insight onto Aus-
trian economics in the final chapters. The demand
for elucidation was so great that he wrote, in detail,
an entire book on the subject: Power and Market.
It is amazing that, for a time, even Dr. Rothbard
forgot his own lesson. The choice was power/poli-
tics vs. market/economics. Using political means
to achieve free-market ends is self- destructive and
self-defeating.
The recognition of the Libertarian incompat-
ibility of statist means to anti-statist ends was
the first agorist insight. Following that, the new
agorists looked for the proper means to achieve a
free society or at least a fully libertarian society.
They sought market means only.
The author of this book and his companions
found the Counter- Economy "staring them in the
face" as soon as they thought of looking.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Chapter Seven
Agorism
T
"^o understand agorism fully and to compare
it to competing ways of thinking, one needs
to know two things about it: its goal and
its path to that goal. This knowledge is critical
to evaluating all ideologies. The goal is living in
the agora and the path is expanding Counter-Eco-
nomics. Remember our constant, if not nagging,
emphasis on consistency, both internally and with
reality. Agorism must have a path consistent with
its goal and a goal consistent with its path.
The Axioms of Agorism
A free society is the goal of many people, not
all of them agorists or even libertarians. Ago-
rists can see nothing but a free market in a free
society; after all, who or what will prevent it?
The First Axiom of Agorism: the closest
approach to a free society is an uncorrupted
agora (open marketplace).
An axiom is a principle or premise of a way of
thinking. It is arrived at by insight, induction, and
observation of nature. Theorems are arrived at
71
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
deductively from axioms. A "zeroeth" axiom of
agorism might be "there are no contradictions
in reality and theory must be consistent with
reality." Commonly known axioms in philosophy
are "existence exists" and "A is A." Well-known math-
ematical axioms are "things equal to another thing
are equal to each other" and "a statement leading to
a contradiction with a theorem or axiom is false."
The first six chapters of this "primer" preceded
the actual presentation of agorism to give you,
the reader, enough understanding of economics,
Counter-Economics, and libertarianism to see
from where the insights that produced agorism
were derived. They were not chosen arbitrarily
but rather as a result of years of bitter experience
and, in some cases, furious battles and acts of
resistance. The "hard core" agorists had to have
something worth dying for, and, far more impor-
tant, worth living for.
The Second Axiom of Agorism: the agora self-
corrects for small perturbations of corruption.
This axiom leads us to a far more detailed pic-
ture of what our nearly free society would look
like. It means simply that free-market entities will
defend the free market. People have to choose to do
it, of course, but the incentive (offering of subjec-
tive-value satisfaction) will be present to motivate
them to do so and will be sufficient to motivate
enough people to do so. Occasional criminals will
be discovered, sought, found, apprehended, tried,
sentenced, compelled to deliver restitution, and (if
possible) deterred from further actions.
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
The Third Axiom of Agorism: the moral
system of any agora is compatible with pure
libertarianism.
This axiom means that life and property are safe
from all those who act morally in this society. We
will describe this in the next section. But let us
complete the axioms first.
The Fourth Axiom of Agorism: agora in
part is agora in whole; to a workable approxi-
mation, the corruption of an agora raises
protection costs and risks.
This axiom's use will become blindingly clear
when we deal with the path.
Agorism has more theory, but it is derived from
these axioms. For the professional logicians trip-
ping across the theory for the first time, I need to
add a fifth axiom for completion: agorism qua
theory is an open system. This simply means
that we may discover and add on other axioms,
then check to see how consistent they are with
what we already have.
The Goal of Agora
ith that short burst of hard philosophy in
the last section, we are ready to picture the
society we are aiming for. The goal of agorism is
the agora. The society of the open marketplace as
near to untainted by theft, assault, and fraud as
can be humanly attained is as close to a free society
as can be achieved. And a free society is the only
one in which each and every one of us can satisfy
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
his or her subjective values without crushing oth-
ers' values by violence and coercion.
It's a bit late to notice, perhaps, but if your
highest values require murder and theft, you will
not like the agora. Still, you have not wasted your
time as you have just read an introduction to the
thinking of your worst enemy.
Science fiction has given us many convincing
portrayals of future societies, from the grotesquely
tyrannical (1984) to the transitional- to-freedom (The
Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Kings of the High Fron-
tier) to actual free-market anarchies that acciden-
tally arose (The Syndic, The Great Explosion, The
Probability Broach). One even portrayed a likely
scenario for an agorist revolution (Alongside Nighty
Still, we cannot predict or foresee all the chang-
es. Fortunately, we can get a good picture of an
agorist society by picking out those changes (from
our present statist societies) that must occur (or
we simply don't have agorism). Our axioms give
us that much.
States will be gone. Roads will be run by com-
peting market companies and kept in repair (for
a change) to attract more customers. Then, again,
cars may levitate over the roads for all we know
or fly or take tunnels to preserve scenery. If you
can think of one good reason to do something some
way, in a free market it will be tried and many
ways will work at the same time for different reasons.
The post office will be gone and mail — if not
replaced by e-mail entirely — will be efficiently
and cheaply delivered ever-faster.
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War will be gone. "Defence budgets" will be gone.
Taxes will be gone. You will pay for what you get only
when you want it — unless what you want is a gift.
I repeat, and cannot emphasize enough or wax
floridly enough: the opportunities in freedom ex-
plode into the unimaginable. The sheer complex-
ity of all possible choice moves to the infinite as
restrictions approach zero.
Let us focus very narrowly on only one business
in the totally free marketplace.
Justice
Justice is a business. It's not free; someone must
pay for its workings. While Justice in the ab-
stract is not an economic question (remember the
wertfrei of Chapter One), the obtaining of justice
is an economic service.
Consider this illustration: Your completely
tricked-out media center is stolen from your home.
You notify Laissez Faire Insurance & Protection
Company immediately. As fast as modern tech-
nology permits, you receive an identical screen,
receiver, game station, speakers, cables, and a
sack full of remotes to replace the original, with
downloads of any programs you missed in the in-
terim. You have achieved full restoration of your
subjective value to the condition it would have
been had there been no act of aggression. Surely
that is the goal of Justice.
Now, how is this paid for in a free market, con-
sistently with our understanding of economics and
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libertarian morality? The moral position first: you
delegate LFI&PCo as your agent to use defensive
force to regain your missing property and all ex-
penses incurred. (If LFI&PCo attempt to extract
more from the ultimately caught thief, they're on
their own. The thief's Insurance and Protection
Company is entitled to defend the thief.)
Costs are paid for in three ways. First, as insur-
ance: a small number of criminals may elude even
the highly efficient, super-technological, extremely
competitive protection agencies of the agorist fu-
ture. Insurance is simply sharing the risk of some-
thing happening with all the others subscribing
to LFI&PCo. As the odds of a thief "getting away
with it" approach zero, your premium approaches
zero. Second, as protection: you install locks and
detectors, alarms, and maybe even booby traps.
Actually, since your premiums will go down as
you make yourself aggression-proof, protection
will incur minimal additional costs. Third, as
restitution: the aggressor, when apprehended,
pays LFI&PCo (1) the cost of replacement of the
purloined or damaged goods; (2) interest for the
time the goods were stolen; (3) any costs related
to apprehension, including fees for investigators,
arresting agents, arbitrators (market judges), and,
if still necessary, enforcers' charges to reclaim
your property.
Note all the differences between statism and
agorism. First, in a State, you can expect nothing
from the police if you report a criminal. Maybe,
some day, you'll get your property back if the
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criminal is ever caught and when they're through
using the components as evidence. Since the odds
of police accomplishing this are less than 10%,
your insurance premiums (if the government still
allows insurance companies) reflect the sharing of
the high risk of theft plus whatever taxes the State
tacks on plus the inefficiencies and additional
costs of government regulation of the insurance
industry. Did you ever try to collect insurance?
Notice the form-filling and red tape — just like
any other government bureaucracy imposed on a
supposedly free enterprise?
Second, in a State, you are under the control of
the State in a criminal proceeding — even though
you are the victim! You will be told when to ap-
pear, where to go, and you will be forced to see
the case through even if you change your mind.
In the agora, should the matter go to arbitration,
you will be required to report your loss since you
want it replaced. That's all. The theft may even
have been recorded on video, but even if not, the
protection company's detectives do all the work.
You stand back (or go about your business) and let
them do their jobs. That's all. You may never be
called again even if the thief is caught, convicted,
and compelled to provide restitution. If LFI&PCo
needs more testimony from you, they will ask you
to attend the arbitration and, if they err, they
will pay for the error. Should they need you inor-
dinately, they will pay you for your trouble — or
they will let you go and lose the case if you want
too much for your time.
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Third, in a State everything is monopolized;
your appeal is to another judge who works for the
State, too. In the agora, competition and choice is
everywhere. There are plenty of insurance and
protection companies from which to choose, all
eager for your business. They can choose from a
number of crack detectives, all competing to show
that they are the best investigators. Should the
matter go to arbitration, a number of arbitrators
are competing for the positions, hoping to prove
themselves the fairest and most worthy of your
company's hire.
Furthermore, if crime risks go up in your neigh-
borhood, it is in the interest of your protection
company (and those companies of your neighbors)
to hire protectors (or guards) to patrol your area.
Unless you attack your neighbor, their protectors
will never threaten you.
Fourth, in a State, your police protection is just
as likely to arrest you for some crime that has no
victim. There are no such victimless "crimes" in
the agora.
Fifth, the rights of the victim (you) can never
be overridden by the rights of the real criminal.
Under agorist justice, the arbitrator rules on
the evidence that you are, or are not, entitled to
restitution of goods (or even parts of the body, as
technology makes that possible), interest for time
lost, and your protection agency's expenses, includ-
ing detection and apprehension costs. The moment
the line is crossed into extracting more from the
media-center thief than full restoration of your
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components and all costs incurred, you or your
company become the aggressor and the ex-thief s
protection agency will now honor its contract to
defend him. (All insurance and protection con-
tracts in an agorist society will stipulate that you
cannot be protected from restoration proceedings
after the protection company has defended you up
to a fair arbitration. This ideal, seldom lived up to
by States, is called "due process.")
The difference between agorist protection and
State policing has many more characteristics but
this list gives you a good idea. There is nothing
the State can offer you in moral protection that
the market cannot offer; and the free market will
function faster and better than the State. It's
true that an occasional market company may be
unsound, but you will always have the option of
switching to a better competitor. Under a State,
you know your protection service will always be
the same — poor with no alternative.
The State offers one thing the free market can-
not and will not offer: aggression. If you wish to
attack your immediate neighbors, you'll need State
police to attack them for the crimes of belonging
to the "wrong" religious group or of taking the
"wrong" intoxicant or of performing sex in a way
of which you disapprove. And, of course, your
neighbors will need State police to attack you for
similar "reasons." If you want to attack faraway
neighbors, you need a State army.
Or maybe you want to live in peace and freedom
and will be satisfied with protection and defence.
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Two Words or So
About National Defence
"TT^ull agorism obviously needs no "national de-
fence." There are no nations to defend and no
nations from which to be defended. Local protec-
tion against occasional criminals is sufficient.
Once in a while, criminals might band together
to overwhelm a single protection company. Then
the agorist protection agency merely needs to hire
another protection company to assist it.
Similarly, should one protection company "go
bad," a few of the hundreds of others would be
enough to apprehend its agents and shut it down.
But, in fact, market forces would sap such a com-
pany's destructive power long before it came to
that. People raised in an agorist society would
stop paying its insurance premiums and shift to its
competitors. Detective and investigation agencies
would terminate their contracts with it. Arbitra-
tors would consistently rule against its aggressive
moves. Agents working for the company would
quit and go elsewhere. Secretaries and office help
would walk out rather than have their reputations
sullied by associating with such un-agorist types.
Even restaurants and grocery stores would refuse
to sell to the renegades or would hike their prices
to show their additional loss of subjective value in
dealing with such coercive filth.
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Perhaps the company-turning- State would pay
higher prices to hold on to their employees and
supplies or replace them. But where would they
get their money? They would lose customers the
moment they started to act like a government. It
is just as likely that they would collapse if they
attempted to live by stealing (tax-collecting) since
they would be compelled by force (of other compa-
nies) to cease and desist their aggression against
those companies' clients.
People raised and educated to love an agorist
society could not fall for taxpaying. And if they
ever do, we will sink all the way down the road of
corruption and oppression to the level of statism. . .
that we "enjoy" today!
The second word about territorial defence deals
with the concerns of most people when they meet
some version of anarchy — even the businesslike,
efficient, free-market kind. How does the non-state
defend itself against all the States still left?
The glib answer is "let me count the ways." A
few should suffice to allay nameless fears.
First, the context must not be forgotten. Gov-
ernment will not disappear until it is rejected by
the overwhelming majority of the people under its
rule. It is highly unlikely that other people, in oth-
er countries around the world, will be unaffected
should North America oust its State through this
libertarian infection. A Libertarian International
formed in 1980, had its first convention in Zurich
in August, 1982, and continues into the 21st cen-
tury as the International Society for Individual
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Liberty (ISIL). Many of these members could be
relied upon to act as fifth columnists in their home
countries to stop their governments from attacking
the obviously peaceful anarchy.
Second, although we do not rule out "naked
aggression," remember that wars are caused by
both sides. There is an entire branch of libertar-
ian theory we skipped in making this presenta-
tion (actually, more than one) called Revisionist
History, which rips the mask off government
war propaganda to reveal the gleaming skull
underneath. The United States, for example, has
not been involved in a single war since the first
Revolution that could not have been avoided nor
one that would have cost American citizens their
liberty had it been avoided (said liberty, to be
sure, which they were already losing to their own
government). Several volumes have been written
about each of these wars, from Establishment and
Revisionist perspectives, but, let me just list the
bold, simple conclusions here and you can research
for yourself whether I'm right.
War of 1812 — US "Warhawks" sought a land
grab in Canada. Pretext for the war: "impressment
of American seamen" in ships running the British
blockade of Napoleon. (True but trivial in com-
parison to war and its cost in lives and freedom.)
Mexican War — U.S. Southern interests
sought land grab of Texas and other Mexican
territories to form more "slave states" to balance
off new Northern "free" states. Pretext: Mexico
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attacked Republic of Texas and thus U.S. sod.
(Probably not; and Texas was not U.S. sod then.)
War Between The States — North wished to
enslave the South; South (justifiably) wished to
be free of the North. Pretext: Abolition of slavery
in South. (North kept slavery in Northern terri-
tory; also, hard-core abolitionists supported both
Southern secession and abolition of slavery as
same issue of freedom.)
Spanish-American War — U.S. interests
grabbed Spanish colonies (Cuba, Philippines) for
exploitation and turned the U.S. State into an
old-world empire. Pretext: U.S. battleship Maine
was "attacked" in a Cuban harbor. (Even though
innocent, Spain apologized anyway and bent over
backwards to avoid war.)
World War I — U.S. interests, especially bank-
ers, bet on Great Britain and moved U.S. in to
save their investments when Russians pulled out
leaving Germany one front. Pretext: German U-
Boats attacked British ship carrying Americans;
declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare
zones by Germany. (Trivial relative to war, and
U.S. ships should have "taken their chances" if
they insisted on running huge risks for high profits
by penetrating the blockades. GB was blockading
Germany and other interests wanted to replay
"War of 1812" and attack Britain.)
World War II (Europe, 1939) — Britain gave
Poland a "blank-check treaty" if they would hold
out 99%-German Danzig from Germany — the last
adjustment of the Versailles Treaty (ending WWI)
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that penalized Germany. Also, Britain and France
refused alliance with Russia against the "fascist
menace" (although Bolshevik Russia was seriously
threatened by Nazi aggression, unlike Danzig-less
Poland, not to mention distant Great Britain)
and thus pushed USSR to German side in fear.
Poland was overwhelmingly outnumbered and
still refused to return German Danzig. Pretext:
Germany invaded Poland without provocation.
(Nonsense; allied war propaganda. Poland was so
surprised that they were already fully mobilized
and standing on the border on September 1,1939.)
World War II (Pacific, 1941) — The United
States New Deal administration sought entry to
the European theatre (above) and required an "at-
tack" since 80% of Americans opposed 'bailing out
Britain" again. Japanese were strangled by British
blockade aided by "neutral" U.S. ships; Japanese
funds in U.S. were seized by U.S. government, and
Japanese emissaries for peace were insulted and
scorned. Pretext: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
naval installation — few, if any innocent U.S. ci-
vilians injured. (Japan knew it would be dragged
into the war and would lose; it struck first to de-
lay the inevitable. Japanese "bushido" code was
offended — deliberately and provocatively — by
U.S. statists.)
Korean War — Artificial division of Korea
(WWII) between a Northern communist dictator-
ship and a Southern, pro-U.S. State dictatorship;
U.S. entered to prop up colonies France and Japan
were abandoning in Southeast Asia for variety
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of corporate-interest and Soviet-containment
reasons. Pretext: Communist aggression which
involved China and Russia. (China attacked the
U.S. after American troops threatened to cross
the Yalu River into China. Russia sat back and
sold arms — as the U.S. had done before landing
troops.)
Vietnam War — U.S. attempted to keep former
French Indo-China from passing into Eastern
bloc. (See Korean War; this was a continuation
from 1954.) As became obvious immediately after,
when China switched over to U.S. side, "Commu-
nist" countries are not necessarily threats to U.S.
Pretext: Defend South Vietnamese, who wanted
Western-style democracy, from Communist form
of statists. (South Vietnamese were split and there
was never anything even as "free" as democracy
there under the various generals and the Diem
dictatorship.)
El Salvador — Certain U.S. industries and
banks have heavy investments in Latin Ameri-
can countries and fear their expropriation by
Communist or Marxist governments. Pretext:
Salvadorans want democracy, not communism.
(Salvadorans voted in U.S. -monitored election
and got a genuine fascist government [ARENA
party of Roberto D Aubuisson] and massive mur-
der of "democrats" — let alone communists — by
ARENA death squads. The U.S. then overruled
the results of an election they had demanded in
the first place.)
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Iraq War I — U.S. sought to preserve its in-
terests in Saudi Arabian oil fields, fearing that if
Kuwait fell and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein
enriched himself from oil profits there, then Saudi
Arabia might be next. Pretext: Iraq invaded Ku-
wait (separated from Iraq by British in 1932) to
regain its port and to seize oil fields on the theory
that they were using a slant drill to "drink the
milkshake" of Iraq's al-Rumaila fields.
Afghan War — U.S. and U.K. attempt to se-
cure Afghanistan to protect a proposed natural
gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and
India passing right through the Kandahar prov-
ince. This, in an effort to counteract perceived
Russo-Iranian energy trade in the region. Pre-
text: Taliban gave aid and comfort to 9/11 attack
coordinator Osama bin Laden, oppressed women,
and served as a training haven for Islamic funda-
mentalist terrorists.
Iraq War II — U.S. continued to perceive Iraq
as a threat to its oil interests in the middle east,
especially after Iraq's scorched-earth retreat from
the Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991. In addition, per-
sonal grudges may have played a part, since the
sitting president's father had once been targeted
for assassination by Hussein. Pretext: Saddam
Hussein's repeated scofflawing of numerous U.N.
resolutions and rumours that Iraq still pursued
weapons of mass destruction.
By the way, those quickie explanations are not
meant to convince you that the U.S. was wrong
and the other sides were right. The agorist view-
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point is that the U.S. State was wrong and its war
opponents were wrong. Both or either could have
avoided any of the above wars.
And, before we forget, there is an obvious third
way the North American non- state defends itself
against the State around it, if it is agorist. The pro-
tection agencies form larger syndicates than the
ones they form in the case we mentioned above of a
local protection company going renegade. If all the
policy holders of all the insurance and protection
companies are threatened by invasion, they will
throw all their combined resources (and higher
technology, judging by free enterprise's past per-
formance) on defence of the common ground.
Fourth, the people would rise up in militias or
guerrilla units to defend their incredibly free so-
ciety. (There were advance hints of this strategy
when the Ukrainian Anarchist army, under Nestor
Makhno, had no trouble raising militia to protect
the local fanners from roving armies of Reds and
Whites during the Russian Revolution.)
Fifth, most wars have had a strong Economic
component. Often access to goods or natural
resources was barred by protectionist State Eco-
nomic policies. The anarchy would have full free
trade with full access. Anyone wanting anything
produced in the North American anarchy could
easily buy it — without taxes and tariffs and at
a cheaper price than anywhere else. (Notice how
giant Communist China went out of its way not
to conquer tiny Hong Kong, although the British
were ready to toss it to them any time they asked,
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
and finally did. Even now, Hong Kong has not
seen Red Chinese tanks rolling through its streets
to crush its capitalist minions. In fact, much of
China has become a mirror of Hong Kong, with
Party leaders and the People's Liberation Army
growing rich on market activities white, black, and
grey. Check also the little free ports and cities of
Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Singapore and
San Marino.)
Sixth, (and we'll have to stop eventually, so
let it be here) the States will quarrel amongst
themselves. Since the anarchy threatens no State
immediately (point two) (long-term, it does, as a
shining example of better conditions), but other
States with standing militaries do threaten at all
times, what State would want the easy-access to
resources (point five) in the anarchy cut off by an-
other State using it? That could mean war — but
among the States while the Anarchy freely sells
to all sides without favor or penalty.
Critics of market anarchy often try to have their
cake and eat it too. For example, they may argue
that there are too few States — "what happens if
the States gang up?" — and at the same time too
many — "how can one anarchy survive among all
those States?" As in the case of historical examples
such as Revolutionary France and Revolutionary
Russia where the surrounding States did gang up
to crush the new type of State, if the country is
big enough, it will survive even foreign interfer-
ence, even in the middle of civil war (which both
experienced) — let alone agorist peace.
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Additional tactics for defence and reasons for
nonaggression are left as an exercise for the reader.
The Agorist Path
/f^ etting from here (statism) to there (agorism)
\_JTis the second and perhaps defining character-
istic of the latter. Unlike libertarianism, agorism
offers both goal and path as an internally consis-
tent package deal.
The short answer is given in Axiom Four. A
longer answer is "applying Counter -Economics to
all your actions and linking preferentially with
others who do so creates an ever-bigger agora."
How that works — and what two things you need
to watch for — is an excellent chapter with which
to end this primer.
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Chapter Eight
Applied Agorism
At this concluding point, we would like to
tie together all we have learned. Thus we
can see clearly the path to be taken with
a view to ending up with a new ability: to figure
out how each of us can best walk that path to our
own advantage. So let us begin by visualizing that
pathway.
The Road From Agora
(Q ince we have some picture of an agorist soci-
Oety and an all-too-good picture of a statist so-
ciety, let us connect them by slowly degenerating
one into the other. Since it is usually more difficult
to see how the "real here-and-now" becomes the
possible, let's run the film backwards. Let us start
with an agorist society and run backwards in time
to what we have now, a statist society.
The State exists because of a mystique that
confers upon it the sanction of the victim. Thus,
we each must have lost our sanction of the State
for the agora to have come about. Very well, run-
ning the film of this in-between period backward,
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Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
it should appear that some "mental plague" is
infecting contented agorists to persuade them,
one by one, to give up their freedom and submit to
control by some embryonic government (a criminal
gang with a good line of buncombe).
At first the State would be able to tax and mo-
bilize only its followers. It would be a voluntary
organization — sadomasochistic, to be sure, but
still tolerated by the unaffected agorists. Every time
the State tried to prey on insured agorists, it would
be brought to arbitration and restitution enforced.
Still, against all reason, the infection grows
and the State is too powerful now for restitution
to be enforced. Some privileged people are able to
live successfully off plunder and be protected by
the mindless subjects of the new State who will
sacrifice their own property, and even their lives,
so that some may live off others. (Remember, this
is the opposite of how people think sanely because
we are deliberately going backwards. It should be
a comfort to know that this route is highly unlikely
in a forward direction.)
The State now has its power elite, ruling class,
conspiracy, or whatever term you like best. They
can distribute some of this unearned wealth to
bribe agorists who have little conviction (and a
weak will) to join the infected masses. Now the
State reaches a level that permits it not only to
stave off the protection companies, but actually
to attack them. At this point, the companies go
"underground" or Counter-Economic, still enforc-
ing contracts among the remaining agorists and
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those who are not being very well defended by the
inefficient State apparatus, as well as those who
are not in favor with the Statists' top-level elite.
Otherwise, people look out for Statist enforcers as
much as possible and develop evasive techniques in
order to keep their manufacture, trade and services
from detection and capture. They develop Counter-
Economic techniques. And they keep on going.
Finally, the State compels its new citizens to
give up their gold for worthless paper; and then
the State divides into several States and mobilizes
the citizens to get to see which ruling class will
get the biggest share of the tax plunder. Sound
like we've gone a little crazy in imagining anyone
permitting this? True enough, but unfortunately,
this craziest picture of all describes nothing less
than the reality we live in right now.
The path from here to agora now becomes blind-
ingly obvious. As more people reject the State's
mystifications — nationalism, pseudo-Economics,
false threats, and betrayed political promises —
the Counter- Economy grows both vertically and
horizontally. Horizontally, it involves more and
more people who turn more and more of their ac-
tivities toward the counter-economic; vertically, it
means new structures (businesses and services)
grow specifically to serve the Counter- Economy
(safe communication links, arbitrators, insurance
for specifically "illegal" activities, early forms of
protection technology, and even guards and protec-
tors). Eventually, the "underground" breaks into
the overground where most people are agorists,
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few are statists, and the nearest State enforcement
cannot effectively crush them.
These agorist condensations are highly vulnera-
ble when first exposed but will probably evaporate
back into the anonymous masses when seriously
threatened. Finally, one grows large enough to de-
fend itself against the nearest State (see Chapter
Seven regarding the many ways that it can defend
itself). Others rally to it and those agorists stay-
ing "home" under States' rule become ever-richer
trading ports with the first agora condensations.
The rapid collapse of State taxation ability at
this point will push the State to rely even more
on inflation to support itself. The Counter- Econ-
omists abandon fiat money ever-faster and use
gold and trusted agorist gold warehouse receipts
("hard- money cheques"). The runaway inflation
approaches what Ludwig Von Mises termed "the
Crack-Up Boom," paper money is completely aban-
doned, like 1923 German reichsmarks and 1781
U.S. Continentals and 1787 French assignats. (See
the aforementioned novel Alongside Night for a
thrilling presentation of this scenario.)
At the critical point when the protection compa-
nies can protect anyone who asks for a policy and is
willing to pay for it, the State loses its monopoly of
legitimized coercion. Once the power elite realizes
that "it has come to this," they will throw all the
force they have left at the agora. The protection
companies will defend the agorists, the taxpayers
will flee the State to the free market, the military
will desert as the State runs out of (acceptable)
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pay and supplies for them, and the State will
collapse. (The last sentence describes the Agorist
Revolution, accept no substitute behavior involv-
ing agorist "attacks" on the State. We are strictly
defensive. Some people with grudges against the
State, incited because of State-murdered loved
ones, may undertake some spectacular commando
raids and such, but that would not be the norm.)
Having spelled all this out, we still have one
big question left unanswered: why has this not
happened already?
The False Dichotomy
Divide and conquer has been a statist motto
and tactic since Julius Caesar. The division of
libertarianism from Counter- Economics has many
causes but several can be attributed to Statist
encouragement of illogic, irrationality, and sheer
mysticism. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the very field of thought confronting us: moral
philosophy and economics. (It is noteworthy here
to remember that the first economist, Adam Smith,
was a professor of Moral Philosophy.)
Morally, the State and its clerical toadies have
separated the moral from the practical. Several
strains of religious thought, Kantian altruism,
down to Hegel's explicit worship of the State,
have told people to try to live morally, but always
fail; then the people were to let the State (with
the blessings of the Established Church of Statist
ideology) punish them.
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Economically, the Court Economists have dis-
torted and changed the laws of economics to suit
the ruling group. Mercantilism, economic nation-
alism, Fabianism, fascism, Keynsianism, mon-
etarism, supply-side Economics, socialism, social
democracy, progressivism, New Deal, Fair Deal,
Square Deal, New Frontier, Just Society, Great
Society, war communism, unspecified Hope and
Change, and middle-of-the-road-ism are political
frauds and economic nonsense. In most cases, the
priests, intellectuals, and rulers knew what they
were doing and continued doing it until the snake
oil no longer sold. Then they simply slapped a new
label on the same noxious brew.
Most people are ignorant of economics today and
remain frightened by the subject. Most people think
morality is either impossible, irrelevant, or some-
thing they can do nothing about but which will catch
up with them eventually, either while they are alive
or after their death. As many sages have repeated,
the truth will set you free. Even the cases where the
truth was dimly seen "as through a glass darkly,"
the liberating effects have been visible. Rebellious
religious sects often morphed into authoritarian
cults, but some achieved incredible freedom, such
as the Rhode Island Baptists, the Pennsylvanian
Quakers, and the American Deists, who advanced
the American Revolutionary ideology. Adam Smith
and his immediate followers in Europe created such
an impact in the early 19th Century trade policies
that a wave of economic prosperity swept the world
with just a lowering of trade barriers toward freedom.
95
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Then came World War I and the heyday of so-
cialism, justified largely by the "failure" of free
enterprise. (It did not fail, it was stifled by internal
"progressive" regulation and external war "emer-
gencies.") With the collapse of socialism and its
various offspring such as Soviet Communism and
American Liberalism, a vacuum has opened for
an ideology to inspire and guide thinking people.
Though the States of the world give lip-service to
various socialist ideals, they are aware (or their
Higher Circles are aware) that socialist ideals are
losing their ability to beguile. Perhaps something
called Libertarianism, having given up its remain-
ing ties to Liberty while promising to provide it
through Statism, will be the next bottle of snake
oil the confidence men of the State will offer to
maintain our sanctions.
The State in the Mind
The State has guns and men to use them. As
we have seen, however, it not only can fail to
coerce a rebellious majority, it cannot even stop
an enterprising minority of black marketeers
and other Counter-Economists. The State must
be defeated in each person's mind. Once you per-
sonally reject its hold over you, you are as free as
your intelligence, your will to take risks, and the
aid of your allies can keep you. New converts to
Christianity describe a similar process, which they
call being "born again." Even in darkest Russia
or China, entrepreneurs thrive and — for a high
96
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
price — buy their well-being and additional free-
dom. Of course, any North American, Australian,
or European reading this should have a relatively
easier time and a higher payoff.
What may be needed — in addition to spread-
ing the word and living it — is some form of
agorist psychology. Perhaps we can use the ex-
amples of therapy for childhood mistreatment or
consciousness-raising groups for feminists, gays,
and other obviously oppressed groups. We can all
get together in small affinity groups of trusted
friends and allies to dig our contradictions out of
our unconscious. We can flush out the State from
our heads by ourselves or together or both ways.
Every law that you obey must be reexamined
with the thought, how does it protect life and prop-
erty 1 ? If, as almost every law in our system does, it
actually constricts the market or steals outright, it
should not be obeyed save when force is reported
nearby and menacing you directly.
Once you have successfully arranged your life to
live in the free- market anarchy to the extent that
you can accept the risks — the higher the risks,
the bigger the payoff, including freedom — you can
and will quite naturally add to your ranks. Risks
are lowered by trustworthy marketeers working
together. Soon everyone will know agorists are the
most trustworthy of all. Come runaway inflation
and depressions, the unemployed and bankrupt
in the State's Economy will see unlimited jobs and
entrepreneurial opportunities, not to mention the
preserved wealth for capital, that the Counter-
97
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Economy offers and join it if only to keep from
starving, losing their homes, their family support,
and their remaining self-respect.
Remember, an agorist is one who lives counter-
economically without guilt for his or her heroic,
day-to-day actions, with the old libertarian mo-
rality of never violating another's person or prop-
erty. There is no "membership card" to fool you;
an agorist is one who lives agorism. Accept no
counterfeits.
There are agorists "trying to live up to it." There
are, of course, liars who will claim to be anything.
As Yoda said so succinctly, "Do. Or do not. There
is no try."
That's Agorism.
98
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
Afterword
Beyond Basic Agorism
A few words may be appropriate here for
the reader who enjoyed the primer but
wishes to go on to the hard stuff. There
are two ways to go.
Horizontally, one can delve deeply into eco-
nomics, Counter-Economics, Revisionist History,
and some areas not really covered here, such as
libertarian philosophy, psychology, and literature.
There are plenty of sources for those who wish to
check out some of our claims here or specialize in
an area of personal excitement.
Vertically, one has fewer choices because few
publications have emerged so far from this brand-
new movement. This author has published New
Libertarian Manifesto — available from KoPubCo
— for those who wish to go beyond mere simple
agorism to become activists, advance protection
agents defending the Counter- Economy by public
relations, education... and other means.
Websites, such as agorism. info and agorist.
com, have sprung up, created by agorists eager to
extend theory into practical action.
99
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
A full-sized book — Counter -Economics — is
awaiting publication at KoPubCo, [though it lay
unfinished at the time of SEK3's death. — VK\. It
will emphasize examples and practice, the theory
being as much as already covered here.
Samuel Edward Konkin III — An Agorist Primer
This First Edition of An Agorist Primer is set in
Century Schoolbook type, a very pleasant and
readable font, at 12 points on 14 point leading.
Titles are in Academy Engraved and Baskerville
Old Face. Typesetting, layout, and cover design
was performed by Black Dawn Graphics, which
has provided services to KoPubCo since 1983.
101
About the Author
Samuel Edward Konkin III was a vanguard move-
ment theorist and hard-core activist since the
historic split between libertarians and conserva-
tives at the YAF convention in St. Louis, 1969. In the
subsequent three and a half decades, he served as edi-
tor and publisher of the longest-lived libertarian publi-
cation, beginning as Laissez-Faire! (1970), then as New
Libertarian Notes (1971-75), New Libertarian Weekly
(1975-77, the longest-running libertarian weekly), and
New Libertarian (1978-1990). He wrote the seminal
work on agorism, New Libertarian Manifesto, in 1980.
He has coined the following terms and concepts,
many of which have turned up in all libertarian pub-
lications: Counter-Economics, agorism, minarchy,
partyarchy, anti-principles, Left Libertarianism, anar-
chozionism, "Browne-out," red market, Kochtopus, and
more. He has influenced the works of authors such as
J. Neil Schulman (Alongside Night) and Victor Koman
(Solomon's Knife), who both had their first professional
fiction sales in the pages of his publications.
Mr. Konkin served as Executive Director of the
Agorist Institute, an outreach organization promulgat-
ing the principles of agorism and counter-economics.
He was guest of honor at science-fiction conventions
and libertarian gatherings and was a seasoned world
traveller. His unfinished magnum opus, Counter-
Economics, will see publication in the near future.
Mr. Konkin died February 23, 2004.
Now that you've read it in electronic form, you might
want to order the keepsake KoPubCo hardcover first
edition of Samuel Edward Konkin Ill's masterpiece.
Counter-Economics,
Total Freedom,
and You
Samuel Edward Konkin III
kopubco.com/aap_hb.html
ISBN 978-0-9777649-4-5
KoPubCo is the publishing division of
The Triplanetary Corporation
mm
The classic of libertarian theory and practice is
back in print in a newly re-typeset, pocket-sized
edition! One of the most influential works in the
| field, New Libertarian Manifesto is more timely
than ever. Includes critiques by Murray N.
Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, and Erwin S.
| "Filthy Pierre" Strauss, and responses by
Samuel Edward Konkin III.
Konkin's writings are to be welcomed.
Because we need a lot more poly-
centrism in the movement. Because
| he shakes up Partyarchs who tend
to fall into unthinking compla-
cency. And especially because
he cares deeply about liberty and can
read and write, qualities which seem to be
going out of style in the libertarian movement."
—Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D.
kopubco.com/nlm_trade.html
ISBN 978-0-9777649-2-1
KoPubCo is the publishing division of
The Triplanetary Corporation
mm
From 1970 to 1990, New Libertarian — in all its myriad forms
— published many of the luminaries of the movement and
served as a springboard for new and upcoming counter-econ-
mic stars. Nearly all back issues are available from KoPubCo
in either their original form or as quality photocopies.
Laissez Faire! (1970)
New Libertarian Notes (1971 to 1975)
New Libertarian Weekly (1975 to 1977)
New Libertarian (1978 to 1990)
New Libertarian Manifesto (1980-2006)
Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance (1981 to 1983)
New Libertarian Notes & Calendar (1985 to 1987)
New Libertarian: The Newsletter (1988 to 1990)
Robert Anton Wilson in New Libertarian Publications
TheAgorist Quarterly
Writers Appearing in New Libertarian Publications
The New Christmas Ctasle!
i — — i
of
Th£ <§>£er£t §torg
of Santa's 'RjzM §on
Samuel Edward Konkin III
and Victor Koman
kopubco.com/tloac_pb.html
ISBN 978-0-9777649-5-2
KoPubCo is the publishing division of
The Triplanetary Corporation
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